The 229 Podcast

March 23, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson are back with a packed Newsday covering three big conversations: the AI security crisis no one is talking loudly enough about, what HIMSS 2026 actually delivered for healthcare leaders, and the real question facing every CIO and CMIO right now: Is your time worth attending two major conferences each spring?  Key Points: 01:03 AI...

March 20, 2026: Healthcare leaders have been talking about the “smart hospital room” for years. Now it is starting to become real. In this live conversation from the floor of HIMSS 2026, Bill Russell speaks with Adam McMullin , CEO of AvaSure , about how virtual care platforms are evolving beyond patient monitoring into a foundation for the hospital room of the future. With deployments across more...

March 19, 2026: What does it take to open an 850-bed, 2-million-square-foot hospital? Thomas Bentley , Chief Information and Digital Transformation Officer at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center , joins Bill Russell to pull back the curtain on one of healthcare's most complex technology challenges. From over 100 delivery robots to virtual nursing cameras and a fully integrated RFID-ena...

March 18, 2026: Most health systems treat EHR migrations as a checkbox, finish the project, move on. James Hammer , COO of Harmony Healthcare IT , says that mindset is costing organizations their most valuable future asset. With 19 years of experience and 715+ unique source applications migrated or archived, James reveals why legacy data is no longer just a compliance burden; it's an emerging sour...

March 17, 2026: Blake Sallé , Chief Revenue Officer at Proofpoint , joins us live from the HIMSS conference floor to break down why agentic AI may be healthcare's next great security vulnerability. With 91% of breaches still entering through email and AI systems proving just as susceptible to manipulation as humans, Blake makes the case for why healthcare organizations need to rethink their entire...

March 16: What are healthcare leaders really talking about at HIMSS? Bill Russell sits down with Sarah Richardson and Drex DeFord to share insights from the executive and cybersecurity forums—and the hallway conversations in between. AI dominates the discussion, but not just in clinical care. The hosts highlight the overlooked opportunities in operational workflows, patient outreach, and administr...

March 12, 2026: Joseph Evans , CMIO for Sentara Healthcare , joins Bill Russell fresh off the VIVE event to unpack what's really happening on the front lines of healthcare AI adoption. From Epic's expanding generative AI catalog to the flood of point solutions promising to solve everything from length of stay to clinical summarization, Joseph shares how Sentara is staying disciplined, evaluating p...

March 11, 2026: What if you could reclaim thousands of hours of IT staff time, without cutting corners on quality? Chris Paravate , CDIO at Northeast Georgia Health System , joins Phillip Furukawa , CRO at SureTest , to reveal how they achieved a 98% reduction in manual testing time across their Epic environment. From 161 regression incidents down to 45, the numbers tell a compelling story. Discov...

March 9, 2026: What happens when well-meaning clinicians use AI tools that no one approved? Bill Russell and Drex Ford are joined by Dr. Holly Urban , Vice President of Business Development at Wolters Kluwer , to unpack a revealing new survey on shadow AI in healthcare. From radiologists sharing PHI over Dropbox to tumor board transcripts sent to unauthorized recipients, the risks are real and gro...

March 5, 2026: From EMR adoption to AI governance, the CMIO role has undergone three rapid transformations. Dr. Veena Lingam , ACMIO at Moffitt Cancer Center, has lived all of them. In this conversation with Bill Russell, Dr. Veena breaks down CMIO 1.0 (change management), 2.0 (data analytics), and the emerging 3.0 era: governing AI tools that health systems may have never paid close attention to....

March 4, 2026: What happens when AI stops being a buzzword and starts showing up in your bottom line? Kali Ihde , Director of Ventures and Innovation at Northwestern Medicine , joins Bill Russell to share how ambient AI has moved from pilot to proven. Reducing documentation time by 20-30%, generating nine additional patient visits per physician per month, and measurably easing clinician burnout. K...

March 2, 2026: Is the CIO role evolving? Or is it quietly being replaced? Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson dig into the emerging CITO trend, the rise of citizen developers, and what AI-powered platforms like Epic's Agent Factory actually mean for healthcare IT leadership. The CIO of the future isn't a gatekeeper; they're the "architect of safe velocity." With 32 years in the industr...

February 26, 2026: What does it actually take to govern AI across a major health system without losing speed or safety? Bill Russell sits down with Dr. James McCabe , CMIO at Jefferson Health , Dr. Benjamin Hohmuth , CMIO at Geisinger , and Kristin Myers , Chief Digital Officer at Northwell Health , for a candid conversation on managing enterprise-wide AI implementation. From building governance e...

February 25, 2026: The nursing crisis is real, and the solutions may be closer than we think. In this executive Interview, Bill Russell sits down with Allison Morin , Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Symplr , to explore what's burning nurses out and what technology can actually do about it. From staffing automation and ambient listening to AI-powered scheduling, Allison paints a compelling pic...

February 23, 2026 : Jacob Hansen , Chief Product and Technology Officer at AvaSure , joins Bill, Sarah, and Drex for a critical conversation about healthcare's looming AI battleground. As Epic launches its agent factory and ambient listening wars intensify, health systems face an existential question: Will they outsource innovation to EHR vendors or build their own agentic workforce? Jacob reveals...

February 23, 2026: Scott Gildea , EVP of Global Delivery at Optimum Healthcare IT , reveals why major healthcare organizations are turning to Costa Rica for managed services. With Epic support now approved, time zone alignment with the US, and massive investments from ServiceNow, Workday, and Amazon creating a skilled talent pool, Costa Rica offers the full-suite IT services healthcare desperately...

February 19, 2026: Bill Russell and Drex DeFord dive deep into the explosive growth of AI agents in healthcare - and the controversial pricing models that could reshape your IT budget. From OpenAI's acquisition of OpenClaw's founder to Epic's agent factory launch, the agentic revolution is here. But there's a catch: VCs now want to charge you based on the labor their AI replaces, not just software...

February 16, 2026: Bill, Drex, and Sarah discuss the explosion of autonomous AI agents around moltbook and CommonSpirit's stunning $1.9 billion decision to terminate their revenue cycle partnership. Moltbot (formerly ClaudeBot) has evolved into an unstoppable force, creating its own social network called moltbook where bots communicate, share knowledge, and even discuss consciousness. Meanwhile, C...

February 12, 2026: Most health systems run Epic downtimes at 3 AM when the hospital is slowest. Jim Feen , SVP and Chief Digital and Information Officer at Southcoast Health , did the opposite. He intentionally took Epic offline at 10 AM on a Wednesday morning without warning staff. Jim reveals why 100% of surveyed leadership wanted to repeat the exercise, how he consolidated 37 separate call cent...

Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson dissect J.P. Morgan healthcare presentations to reveal what's really being asked of technology leaders in 2026. The era of transformation talk is over; executives want friction reduced, margins improved, and growth enabled. Bill shares insights from CMIO conversations showing leaders moving beyond EHR optimization to solve real business challenges ar...

February 5, 2026: Jennifer Goldman , VP, CMIO, and Chief of Primary Care at Memorial Healthcare System , reveals why most patient access initiatives fail before they start. The problem isn't technology; it's template management, physician engagement, and clinical escalation workflows that non-clinical call centers can't navigate. Jennifer shares how Memorial added 10,000 same-day access visits by...

February 4, 2026: Mark Scruggs , President and COO of SureTest , reveals why healthcare organizations are achieving 80% reductions in testing time and why renewal rates are unprecedented. Mark discusses how automated testing for EHR upgrades and implementations delivers ROI within six to nine months, eliminates over 20,000 hours of manual work annually, and has created what KLAS calls the only tru...

February 2, 2026: Are health systems being sidelined from healthcare's innovation revolution? Jason Rose , CEO of Clearsense , joins This Week Health fresh from the J.P. Morgan Conference to challenge the narrative that providers are absent from innovation discussions. Jason reveals what really happened inside JPM's exclusive health system presentations, from CEOs prioritizing AI transformation to...

January 29, 2026: Reid Stephan , VP and CIO of St. Luke's Health System , sits down with Sangeet Paul Choudary , author of “Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy”, to challenge the way leaders look at how AI will affect their workflow. Sangeet reveals how AI doesn't just augment workers—it restructures entire organizational systems and redistributes power. From AI scribes to t...

January 26, 2026: Fresh from J.P. Morgan 2026, the This Week Health team joins Zahid Rathore , Senior Partner at Chartis , to dissect healthcare's new reality. With Epic and Microsoft topping CFO spend lists and unpredictability replacing planning cycles, one thing is clear: vendors must prove bankable ROI immediately or lose the deal. The conversation explores how healthcare leaders are protectin...