________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Compliance with spirit
Beth Stevens of Sword Health is helping shape legal strategy for healthcare’ s AI era
Healthcare faces a familiar squeeze: demand keeps rising while clinician shortages limit access to care. At the same time, AI is moving from experimentation into patient-facing services, raising questions for regulators and providers alike. The issue is not whether AI belongs to healthcare delivery; it is how organizations use it, govern it, and adapt as the rules keep changing.
For Beth Stevens, Chief Legal Officer at Sword Health, those questions are not theoretical. They shape the legal, regulatory, and strategic decisions her team makes every day.
Sword Health pairs AI with licensed clinicians across physical health, mental health, women’ s health, and cardiometabolic care. Beth oversees legal, compliance, regulatory, governance, and public policy across multiple markets, helping leadership evaluate risk and prepare for developments where rules are not yet established. That puts her in a position familiar to many legal leaders today. She helps a business move forward while the ground beneath it keeps shifting.“ We’ re really focused on delivering highquality healthcare through AI to the world, not just US patients. We’ ve expanded into Canada, the UK, Germany, and Portugal. There are many moments when AI and the clinician, working together, can help people get the care they need,” she explains.
Risk and reality
Beth treats legal risk as one input among many in a broader business conversation.“ The legal risk is no different than any other risk sitting around the table. There’ s product risk, financial risk, HR risk. My job is to explain the risk, explain the consequences, and I think of risk as the likelihood of occurrence times the consequence of occurrence.”
That view has followed her across transportation, lending, real estate, financial services, and now healthcare; industries with complex regulations and few easy answers.
122