January 14, 2026: Identity has evolved from a back-office security concern into the foundation of healthcare's competitive strategy. Steve Gwizdala, VP of Healthcare at Ping Identity, reveals how health systems are rethinking identity to win patient loyalty in an era of unprecedented choice. With patients selecting care based on digital convenience and clinicians demanding frictionless access, the stakes have never been higher. From eliminating password fatigue to preparing for agentic AI threats, Steve unpacks the identity challenges reshaping healthcare delivery. Discover why smartphones made digital experience a requirement, not a nice-to-have, and what leaders should prioritize as identity becomes central to revenue growth and brand loyalty.

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Key Points:

• 02:15 Challenges and Solutions in Identity Management
• 05:58 Modernizing Identity for Better Outcomes
• 10:55 Preparing for the Future of AI Identity in Healthcare
• 18:52 Speed Round and Closing Thoughts

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Executive Interview: Demystifying Identity and Digital Experiences with Steve Gwizdala

No more choosing between user experience. Security and compliance healthcare systems using ping identity count, login times and complexity. Increase security and reduce help desk costs while meeting the strictest audit requirements. See how at this week, health.com/ping identity. That's this week.

health.com/p ING dash identity.

Let's connect.

Sarah Richardson: Welcome to This Week Health. I'm Sarah Richardson, and today I'm joined by someone shaping the future of identity in healthcare. Steve Gz, vice President of Healthcare for North America at Ping Identity.

As health systems accelerate AI adoption and digital transformation, identities become a mission critical item for security, patient access, and increasingly for agentic AI governance, ping sits at the center of that ecosystem, helping organizations protect identities, streamline access. And enable the next gen of healthcare experiences.

Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Gwizdala: Thank you for having me, sir. Appreciate it.

Sarah Richardson: I'm so happy you're here. I was. We're looking forward to this conversation because you have had a fascinating journey across healthcare technology. What originally drew you into the identity space and what led you to Ping?

Steve Gwizdala: It's a very long story, but I'll keep it short.

That's really where I started securing end users so, I was intrigued by. Good actors, bad actors, kind of wanting to be a whole part of that solution. That's what got me into securing enterprises and that's where I started. Now with respect to Ping, what I was really fascinated with them was 2017 and it was how rabid their customers were and how they were being rated that time by Gartner and by Forrester, and now eight years later we've been in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for nine years.

And I was brought in to start a healthcare vertical, and our healthcare vertical is thriving. So that's kind of where I came from and how I got here.

How do you explain Ping identities value to an executive who's still trying to make sense of the fragmented identity space?

Steve Gwizdala: It really boils down to two levers. And those two levers for an executive standpoint is, can I increase my revenue or can I decrease my cost? Mm-hmm. And that's really what the fragmented identity space is all about.

Costing the organization like a tremendous amount of money and think of that both from maintaining it from a system perspective as well as a personnel viewpoint. So if I have all these fragmented identity stores and systems throughout the enterprise, I've gotta maintain all the talent for every one of those systems as I move forward.

Sarah Richardson: Identity always was a security project, but it's not anymore.

It's really central to everything. As you've noted, a digital front door, AI governance, clinical productivity, stickiness for the consumer, and how easy it is to access systems. What major shifts are you seeing in how health systems are thinking about identity today.

Steve Gwizdala: Yeah. You nailed it with, you talk about digital versus security.

It's really, I mean, if you boil it down, how does a payer or a provider. Become more relevant in the world of healthcare because all of them, patients, members, clinicians, they all have choices and patients can determine where they go to get their healthcare. I mean, you and I were joking about where we are and where we live.

You know, like hospitals, when I look at it from a member perspective, for a payer side, members have choices and they're now competing across borders, meaning across different states, where in the past it wasn't that way. Now I can go in through marketplaces, I can go in through Medicare and Medicaid, I can look at supplements and really boils down to are you easy to do business with?

Do you accommodate all different demographics? Meaning, you know, age brackets especially because they all wanna do business with you in a different way. If you look, that's more on the consumer side. If you look on the workforce side, when it deals with like clinicians, how do they get access to what they need to do their jobs quickly?

It's no longer an afterthought or a nice to have, if you will. It's a requirement.

Sarah Richardson: It is interesting you say that because even last night I was facilitating a conversation for an association in healthcare I'm a part of, and one of the questions was, do people even go to a website anymore? Everything is app driven, and then within that app is all these generational sort of requirements about ease and the ability to get to the consumer end to the patient.

So I'm curious, Steve, when we think about the real impact that's occurring, what outcomes are you seeing when organizations modernize identity with pain?

Steve Gwizdala: When you get into that, and again, I guess let me break it into two different areas, and I think this will be a theme as we discuss this, is there's two different tracks.

And so what this does is from a modernization perspective, it eliminates me as clinician making a phone call requesting to a help desk, you know, all trying to do that, but not doing my job, getting frustrated if I will, on that side. And the other piece on it from the employee perspective is more on the security side.

How do I reduce the number of access points for potential frauds or breaches? As you know, based on your background, healthcare is the number one target for breaches. And so how do we really catch a potential bad actor before they even get access to a critical system? So that's how I would look at it from the workforce side.

You may be like, Hey, I wanna use biometric, I wanna use my eyes, I wanna use my thumb. somebody else's old school, they want a one-time password sent to their phone, you know, like an SMS message. I wanna authenticate by a phone call, somebody calling me on my landline to authenticate to my digital phone, and allowing them to do that take that option, if you will.

And then managing their usernames, their passwords, their sharing of records versus having to contact the call center. You know, you're really, what you're doing is you're increasing that patient and member satisfaction. You're overall decreasing your cost. So I won't say it's a hundred percent altruistic.

I stuck myself out again because it's going to multiple places. But based on what you're talking about, you can reduce some of the time to onboard clinicians. Essentially eliminating the friction at patient login. All of this is strengthening security and it's virtual care, remote workforce models that are really being enabled as well.

And do you have a favorite story or example of a health system that has made this transformation feel more tangible, something that clinicians and patients can feel right away that you are able to share?

Steve Gwizdala: I do. I have several, but I'll use one because we all run into it. This is a top 10 US healthcare provider.

And what it did was it provided access to them. Meaning the patient and member based on permissions. So as I log in, as I go to different areas, I get permissions to what I'm entitled to. And how this is different is someone may say, well, oh, it's electronic medical record. That's not exactly what they did.

Because they had doors not only to EMR, they had doors to physical therapy. They had do doors to online scheduling, they had doors to specialists. I always use the example is you're a weekend warrior. You accidentally hurt your knee. So you go to the ER and you do have an EMR. It has your patient medical record number, but they also did x-rays with you.

What they did is they said, no, let's create one front door. And now Steve or Sarah, that weekend Warrior can go in and see everything based on where they are. And then like we talked about, the advantage of that was they put the identity in the hands of the patient, which now they can not have to go to the health desk.

They can control their own journey. They can even share their medical record with, Hey Sarah, you're my sister. I want you to see what I just did. That's all at the hands of the patient now. It's just, it's a great transformation story where like you asked before, they put digital in the middle of it, an identity in the middle of it versus an afterthought,

Sarah Richardson: I mean, healthcare's racing to adopt agentic ai, and I had to explain to somebody yesterday a difference between generative and agent, but none of that scales safely without strong identity governance.

Steve Gwizdala: Well, I think your opening comment about discussing it and educating people is right in the middle of what we're doing right now.

Number one thing we have to do is educate our customers on what genic AI even means to them and what it means to the security space. And we're really seeing, I would say, four distinct categories where ai, agentic AI really takes place. And what they are is pretty simple. Is it like a customer service agent?

So think of that more on your consumer side, the patient, the member side, right? Which is the customers, the patients, the members our customers, meaning like the providers and payers are creating agents to serve us as the patient and member to answer the most common questions, right? So use this agent, go ask what you want, and we'll develop it and do that.

Integrated experience of ask a question, I do this, and I come back to you and we inter we, we act back and forth, but we're doing things again on my behalf. Then you flip it to the workforce and the workforce. What they're doing is they're trying to do genic AI for employee efficiency, right? So now those third party agents are doing things on behalf of me and I'm working for the provider, or I'm working for the payer.

Do they log in? Like as a workforce member, they're logging into my system as me. What does that mean?

Sarah Richardson: I'm curious what you're seeing here too, because people are overwhelmed with all these vendors and partners coming forward and saying, Hey, we do identity. We can help you with this and here's all the different places using our technologies.

But there is a differentiation point for paying and how do you build credibility when it's noisy out there? People are all saying they can do these things. So what does it mean for a health system leader to go with Ping as their solution?

Steve Gwizdala: it boils down to truly understanding their landscape and current capabilities.

If you could, would you add nav to it? Would you add backseat stuff to it? If you had kids, would you add, you know, if it's a truck, would you add runners on the side? That's really where we build the most trust and capability with our consumers. Our customers, if you will, is how can we make your current infrastructure better?

What value can we bring to you to augment that? Can we eliminate cost like we talked about? Can we increase user satisfaction? Are there areas that we could mitigate high risk? That's what we need to do to bring the value to them to establish why we could make it better.

Sarah Richardson: And if you were meeting with healthcare leaders today, and we're thinking about 20, 26 and beyond, and we all joke that you can't go more than a couple years out because it's too.

Steve Gwizdala: think there's a few things that I would look at, and you actually nailed a couple of them. The AI component that we talked about previously is not just the AI driven, but the genic threats. And these can be things like DeepFakes, which are in the news all the right now. Can we distinguish a human, a bot, an agent?

What do we do? How do we go after that? How do we look at verification or some kind of authorization as we go? That ties into kind of verifiable credentials. We've seen this and we see this really becoming more of a threat is that how do we understand the digital credentials of an individual and how do we make sure that they are who they say they are?

Not just, I trust Steve. 'cause I think that's where we're getting a lot of things over the future, now that they're gonna go in and exploit The other piece, I would talk about probably two other components that I think about it and I'll stop at too. Is the identity for everything in medical, it's been called IOMT versus just IoT, you know, the Internet of medical devices.

Is how do we secure that relationship as it grows more and more with the people, the devices, the APIs, the emerging agents that are coming in the lifecycle with that remote monitoring is really big right now. So when you do home care and you take that maybe EKG home with you, how do I know it's actually assigned to you?

I would say that is another one. And the last one would be outside of that, which is supply chain attacks. And this is where you've seen a lot of breaches come in, where they're coming in through a third party and the business to business, the identity governance that you mentioned earlier, understanding what the relationships are.

Is it delegated, is it continuous verification? All of that. I would say moving forward is a big threat that we can't ignore.

Sarah Richardson: You know, it's so interesting you mentioned the supply chain angle. 'cause even this morning, wall Street Journal podcast was reporting how Jamie Diamond is bringing forward a whole group of all of his friends like Jeff Bezos to talk about how to secure supply chains.

And Bill touched on it in an article earlier this week that, hey, a couple years from now, 500 of your beds are in people's homes, and how are you protecting that? So for people listening to this and whether they're a customer of yours or not, if you're doing that kind of planning, you want ping at the table.

Steve Gwizdala: Couldn't agree more. Absolutely. Yeah.

Sarah Richardson: No, it's good to hear there's solutions out there that people can rely upon. Okay, now we get into speed round. Are you ready?

Steve Gwizdala: I guess so. I don't have a choice.

Sarah Richardson: I do this to everybody, so if you're listening, you listen to the show, you're like, oh, I know she's gonna ask me some stuff.

All right. What would you say is the most overlooked identity risk in healthcare today?

Sarah Richardson: Okay. And if you could eliminate one access related frustration for clinicians, what would it be?

Steve Gwizdala: You'll appreciate this one.

Entitlements, you know, making sure that you give them access for what they need upfront.

Sarah Richardson: It's always a fun conversation. Uh, Favorite leadership book or philosophy that guides you today?

Steve Gwizdala: It's a combination of both. 'cause I think it's actually a book and it's also a philosophy, which is hope is not a strategy.

Sarah Richardson: Yeah, for sure. Steve, I'm so grateful that you are here today. Appreciate your the insights you provided to our audience and helping to demystify the, this whole identity space that we live in today. And again, for our listeners in health systems ready to explore what Ping Identity can help them solve, where do they start?

Do they reach out to you on LinkedIn? Like, how do you want them to find you?

Sarah Richardson: Well, that's fantastic. Plus you can also reach out to us here at the team at this Week Health. We're happy to connect you with Steve as well. So all of our listeners, and to Steve, thank you for joining us. This has been another fantastic executive interview with this Week Health. Thanks for listening, and that's all for now.