The Signal Room | AI in Healthcare: Strategy, Governance & Ethical Leadership

Send us Fan Mail AI agents in healthcare only work if they know when to stop. Basata CEO Kaled Alhanafi explains how his team builds agentic AI for hospital and practice operations, and why trust and governance matter more than the algorithm. Kaled Alhanafi left Lyft and Cruise to build a healthcare company after his family's experiences with the healthcare system. He now leads Basata, a heal...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Sarah Matt joins Chris Hutchins to examine pilotitis, the cycle of healthcare projects that struggle to move beyond testing. This episode of The Signal Room focuses on the practical challenges of scaling healthcare AI and bringing clinical voices into technology decisions.  Sarah shares her path from medicine into health technology leadership and discusses the concept of borde...

Send us Fan Mail Chapters 0:00 The claim: the human side of leadership beats the tech 2:31 Why AI multiplies a leader's existing challenges (×10) 5:20 Running the Heart Leadership Index on ChatGPT vs. Claude 10:03 What "coherence" really means (the orchestra before the conductor) 12:42 The fragmented-leader problem: your rollout inherits your chaos 18:02 The research: measuring cohe...

Send us Fan Mail Patient access problems are often invisible until calls go unanswered, staff become overwhelmed, and patients start looking elsewhere for care. Chris Hutchins talks with Jakub Grajcar, Head of Marketing at Talkie.ai and host of Scaling Practice Management, about where an AI medical receptionist can help and where human judgment must take over. Their conversation covers routine sch...

Send us Fan Mail Cybersecurity failures do not begin and end with technical controls. They often begin with normal human behavior under pressure: urgency, trust, distraction, and the desire to help. Chris Hutchins talks with Craig Taylor, co-founder of CyberHoot and a cybersecurity leader with decades of experience, about why punishment-based awareness programs fail and how positive reinforcement...

Send us Fan Mail AI can make a business more efficient, but the harder question is whether the system deserves trust. Chris Hutchins sits down with Chris Bruner, founder and CEO of Simple AI Solutions, for a practical conversation about what “done-for-you AI” actually looks like for business owners. They examine how to identify the right problems to automate, why poor data and technical debt can q...

Send us Fan Mail Healthcare organizations continue to invest in data platforms, integration tools, and AI initiatives, yet many still cannot move trusted information across the enterprise or turn it into timely decisions. Ted Lindsley, CEO of CognomIQ, joins Chris Hutchins in Dallas to examine why healthcare data integration keeps breaking down — and what leaders should demand from the systems and...

Send us Fan Mail Travis Garland spent two decades in healthcare operations running data analytics for one of the largest health payers in the world before going all-in on AI agents. As CEO of Kickstand AI, he builds agents for medical practices. But during a routine scheduling project, his team discovered something alarming: front-office staff were pulling patient schedules, containing protected h...

Send us Fan Mail Only 12% of people are fully health literate, a statistic Dr. Terry Adirim calls "astounding." As patients increasingly turn to ChatGPT and Claude before their appointments, she has one clear rule: never upload your full medical record into a general LLM. In this episode, Chris Hutchins sits down with Dr. Adirim, pediatric emergency physician, former Acting Assistant Sec...

Send us Fan Mail The 2 AM AI Mistake That Can Destroy Your Business Overnight There's a version of AI that quietly grows your business while you sleep, and a version that sends the wrong message to the wrong client at 2 a.m., and nobody catches it for a week. Same tools. Different outcome. The difference is what you keep a human on. In this episode, Chris Hutchins sits down with Ethan, founde...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when someone struggling with addiction finally reaches out for help at 3:00 AM, but nobody picks up the phone? In this episode of The Signal Room , host Chris Hutchins sits down with David Sichel , founder of Blue Shirt Media and a person in long-term recovery. David is pioneering responsible, highly tailored AI technology for drug and alcohol treatment centers, ensur...

Send us Fan Mail The Hidden Reason Hospital AI Keeps Failing | Angel Mena Everyone's chasing the AI demo. Almost nobody's fixing the process underneath it. In this episode, Chris sits down with Angel Mena, Chief Medical Officer at Symplr and former primary care physician and residency program director, to unpack why most AI pilots in healthcare stall — and why "layering AI on top of...

Send us Fan Mail Why AI Agents Are Healthcare's Next Biggest Security Risk (with Pranava Adduri) Generative AI is changing how the medical world works—but it is also completely rewriting the cyber threat landscape. When a security breach happens to a traditional business, it impacts revenue. When a data breach happens to a hospital system, people's lives are actively at stake. In this ep...

Send us Fan Mail Is your organization’s data secretly floating around on the public web? In this episode of The Signal Room , host Chris Hutchins dives deep into the operational layer of AI risk with cybersecurity expert Aaron Puckett , Executive Vice President at Managed Services Group. Many corporate boards think they are protected because they signed off on an official AI policy. But as Aaron e...

Send us Fan Mail Why "Academic" AI Models Fail the 3 AM Real-World Stress Test What happens when pristine corporate AI benchmarks collide with the messy realities of the frontline at 3:00 AM? In this episode of The Signal Room , emergency physician and AI red-teamer Dr. Omer Atli joins host Chris to expose why enterprise-grade AI models frequently collapse in resource-constrained environ...

Send us Fan Mail Before he was advising boards on AI strategy, Bennett Bordon spent eight years as a U.S. intelligence analyst, then went to law school, then earned a graduate degree in data analytics. That cross-disciplinary background eventually led him to analyze a decade of billing data from 14,000 attorneys, and conclude that roughly 80% of what lawyers do today is better done by AI. Bordon i...

Send us Fan Mail What does it mean to be ready — really ready — to take care of a patient at 3am? Passing boards says you're safe enough to start. But clinical judgment? That's built through repetition, feedback, and experience that nursing education often can't provide. And the consequences of that gap are real: 50% of new grad nurses leave the bedside within 2 years, before they e...

Send us Fan Mail Are your employees using AI as a tool, or is it quietly eroding your company's culture?  In this episode of The Signal Room, we explore why digital transformation is primarily a trust event, not a technical one. Guest Katherine Tuominen, an organizational narrative strategist, joins the show to uncover the growing friction between top-down executive directives and the lived o...

Send us Fan Mail Less than 25% of employees say they trust their CEO. Two-thirds of the global workforce is disengaged. And now companies are rolling out AI on top of that already-broken foundation. In this episode of The Signal Room, Chris sits down with Diane Weaver, fifth-generation entrepreneur, EdTech veteran (Pearson, Waterford), and co-founder of Baryons to talk about the trust crisis hidin...

Send us Fan Mail Explore the AI literacy crisis in healthcare with Dr. Steve Labkoff, focusing on AI governance, ethical leadership, and responsible AI strategy. Learn how leaders can navigate AI democratization and clinical AI implementation to ensure trustworthy AI systems that advance healthcare innovation and patient safety. Dr. Steven Labkoff, physician executive and former VP at Bristol Myer...

Send us Fan Mail Sid Dutta is a 24-year cybersecurity veteran, former data-protection executive at American Express, Worldpay, Activision Blizzard, and OpenText and Founder & CEO of Privaclave AI. His work targets the layer most healthcare AI conversations ignore: the runtime data layer where pilots actually stall. In this episode, Chris Hutchins and Sid examine why healthcare data governance...

Send us Fan Mail Healthcare AI and ethical leadership must give time back to clinicians, not take more away — Poonam Patel on AI strategy, provider burnout, and trust erosion in healthcare. Provider burnout is pushing clinicians out of healthcare at an unsustainable rate. In this episode of The Signal Room, Chris Hutchins sits down with Poonam Patel, a pediatric nurse practitioner turned healthcar...

Send us Fan Mail The $50B AI in healthcare investment wave is outpacing what most health systems can govern — Lorraine Fernandes on AI strategy, AI governance, and the dark side of the medical AI boom. The $50 billion AI in healthcare investment wave is accelerating faster than most health systems can evaluate, integrate, or govern the tools arriving on their doorstep. Lorraine Fernandes, a global...

Send us Fan Mail AI governance is the difference between shipping healthcare AI and watching the project get shut down — Andre Samokish on privacy, AI strategy, and governance for 2026. AI governance is becoming the difference between shipping AI in healthcare and watching the project get shut down. Andre Samokish, a privacy and AI governance expert, joins Chris Hutchins to explain why most AI ini...

Send us Fan Mail Ethical leadership and AI strategy collapse when the people executing the strategy are quietly burning out — Carly Caminiti on why culture determines healthcare AI success. Healthcare innovation leadership stops working when the people who execute the strategy are quietly burning out. Carly Caminiti, an ICF-certified executive coach and creator of the 5C Leadership Performance Sys...