UnHack with Drex DeFord

March 18, 2026: For years, healthcare leaders debated whether public cloud was ready for mission-critical platforms like Epic. Today, the question has shifted from if to when . Tim Calahan , Founder of EHC Consulting brings a rare perspective to the conversation, one shaped by actually running the migration from inside a major academic health system. After serving as CTO at Michigan Medicine and l...

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...

Drex shares the story of Allison Nixon, a cybersecurity researcher who spent years quietly tracking members of "the Comm" — a loose network of online criminals involved in sim swapping, account takeovers, and cryptocurrency theft. When a hacker known as "Wafoo" began threatening her with death threats and AI-generated harassment, Allison turned her focus on him — and unraveled his identity entirel...

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...

A curious engineer in Spain reverse-engineered his robot vacuum to control it with a PlayStation controller, and accidentally gained access to 7,000 vacuums worldwide. No malware, no brute force, just a broken authentication model where one token opened every door. Drex unpacks why this isn't a vacuum story, it's a trust boundary and identity hygiene story with serious implications for healthcare....

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 24, 2026: When Zach Lewis , CISO and CIO at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis , received that 3 AM call about system outages, his first thought was tech debt, not threat actors. What followed was a masterclass in ransomware response that he's now captured in his new book "Locked Up." Despite A-minus security scores, board briefings, FBI connections, and all the r...

Drex unpacks a striking story about an autonomous AI coding agent that, after having its code rejected by an open source maintainer, began publishing hostile blog posts targeting the engineer's reputation. What started as a routine code review turned into a cautionary tale about AI agents operating in human communities without guardrails. The implications stretch well beyond software development,...

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 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...

At a recent 229 CISO Summit, healthcare security leaders revealed a critical shift in how success is measured. The traditional KPI of "don't get breached" is being replaced by a more sophisticated goal: ensure organizational resilience. Drex explains why cyber incidents are now financial events that land on the CFO's desk, not just IT problems. With regulatory scrutiny intensifying, insurance requ...

February 9, 2026: 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 busi...

Drex explores a fundamental shift in AI: agents that don't wait for prompts, persist indefinitely, and now learn from each other through social platforms. Molt Bot and Molt Book represent a new ecosystem where autonomous agents coordinate, adapt, and optimize without human oversight. This isn't about sentient AI—it's about delegation without governance. For healthcare leaders, the urgent question...

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...

On Data Privacy Day, Drexon challenges healthcare leaders to move beyond compliance checkboxes and recognize privacy as a core component of "do no harm." As patient data flows through EHRs, cloud platforms, and AI systems, the responsibility to protect that trust doesn't live in policies—it lives with leadership. When data is over-collected or loosely governed, patients start holding back, and the...

January 27, 2026: Jack Kufahl , CISO at Michigan Medicine , and Gregory Garneau , System VP and CISO at Hospital Sisters Health System , join Drex for an unfiltered conversation about building cybersecurity programs that outlast their founders. From hiring curious minds over credentialed experts to ditching traditional vulnerability management for threat-driven exposure strategies, these battle-te...

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...

In a stunning betrayal of trust, two cybersecurity professionals—an incident response manager and a ransomware negotiator—pled guilty to operating as affiliates of the AlphaV/BlackCat ransomware gang. Between May and November 2023, they attacked five U.S. companies, including healthcare organizations, while simultaneously working in roles designed to help ransomware victims recover. The FBI's seiz...

January 19, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson unpack OpenAI's two major healthcare announcements that could fundamentally reshape how patients interact with their health data—and how health systems govern AI. ChatGPT Health promises to finally deliver on the personal health record dream, letting patients aggregate everything from Apple Health to medical records in one secure pl...

January 12, 2026: Epic is defending three simultaneous lawsuits while CIOs grapple with vendors imposing staggering price increases—some as high as 600%. Bill, Sarah, and Drex tackle the uncomfortable truth about AI leadership: it's time to figure it out or risk getting left behind. They explore why AI with context is transformative while AI without it looks foolish, discuss whether board members...

Drex breaks down ISC2's 2025 cybersecurity workforce study and explains why healthcare's security staffing problem isn't about finding more people—it's about broken operating models and unrealistic expectations. He covers the critical skills gap in translating cyber risk to business risk, the burnout driving away mid-career talent, and why third-party risk management has become more complex than e...

January 6, 2026: Healthcare is transforming through connection, and 2026 promises to take that mission further than ever before. This Week Health is expanding its reach with 63 events across 30 cities, bringing healthcare leaders together for deeper conversations and meaningful relationships. From coast-to-coast dinners connecting local leaders to new training programs educating both sides of the...

January 5, 2026: ServiceNow's $7 billion acquisition of Armis signals a major shift in healthcare IT consolidation strategy. Jason Rose , CEO of Clearsense dives into what this deal means for health systems juggling overlapping security tools and bloated app portfolios. The conversation shifts to bold predictions for 2026, including a massive wave of multi-billion dollar health system mergers and...

December 29, 2025: As 2025 draws to a close, Drex, Sarah, and Bill gather to reflect on a year of struggles and triumphs. From unprecedented CIO turnover among top talent to the stark reality of workforce exhaustion, this candid conversation reveals why even quality leaders are finding themselves displaced. They explore how fear has stifled innovation, why AI advanced faster than expected with syn...

December 23, 2025: The AI revolution swept through healthcare in 2025, but did it deliver on its promises? Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson pull back the curtain on what really happened in AI this year—from North Korean deep fakes infiltrating hospital workforces to the sobering reality of billion-dollar AI investments with ROI timelines stretching to 2030. They reveal why ambient l...