The 229 Podcast

By 229ProjectBusiness Medicine Health & Fitness Technology

The 229 Podcast episodes

October 15A Lot of the AI Value Is Still Anecdotal | The 229 Podcast
October 15, 2026: The same AI panel opened four 229 Regional Staff Roundtables in September: New Orleans (September 10), Portland (September 15), San Diego (September 17), and Atlanta (September 22). Health system IT leaders on stage. Their teams at the tables. This episode pulls the four rooms together by topic.
Sarah Richardson opens it the way she opened Portland, with the Signal Check the room filled out before it walked in. In Portland, 65% named competing priorities and capacity as the top challenge.
Shane Thielman at Scripps Health went after cost, not revenue. Autonomous coding on emergency department facility coding. About a 50% decrease in the cost per encounter. About 70% coverage in certain areas of that work. It has since moved into professional billing for radiology.
A Piedmont physician built a mock ICU tracker on personal time. Fake patients, a personal AWS server, a GitHub account, so he could show what the tool should look like. He knew the governance. Lacy Knight: "something we can't support today."
Takeaways:
Julie Eastman (PeaceHealth) would defend the initiative that gives clinicians more time to be present with their patients, and that gives the evidence the time was truly returned. A lot of the value is still anecdotal.
Lisa Johnson (Providence): about five minutes saved per patient contact on the provider side, before the workflow was refined. An operational leader had set aside four to five hours to compare policies. Copilot did it in about 10 minutes.
Falyn Curtis (Ochsner Health) turned on Epic's billing assistant and saw fewer calls about bills, and more of those bills paid once patients could ask what the bill was for. Will Landry (FMOL Health) saw the same drop the day they turned it on. He put it at 60% fewer calls on that topic.
Glynis Cowart (Woman's Hospital): ambient listening has to be turned off for a phone call, or the conversation lands in the chart.
Lacy Knight: the EHR made bad processes obvious, and "AI has done that a hundredfold." The value is in rethinking the work.
Drex DeFord: take a train wreck of a process and it becomes a fast and efficient train wreck.
Josh Glandorf (UC San Diego Health): the bottleneck is operational transformation time, not IT time, "with much bigger boulders."
Bonnie Boles (Tanner Health) will not move a project until an EVP names the top three. Julie Eastman asks why AI is governed separately from the rest of the portfolio.
Same tool, different result. Epic chart summarization in ambulatory was not helping at Tanner. Clinicians found it slow, mistrusted a miss, and could not turn it off. Lacy Knight called the same tool a home run at Piedmont. Her first Copilot rollout went the other way: access went to people who do not live in Microsoft tools, and adoption was poor.
Will Landry chose not to block ChatGPT, so FMOL could see the traffic, including on guest Wi-Fi. Pete D'Addio (LCMC Health) is watching the token bill. Steve LeBlond (Prisma Health) treats shadow IT as a need IT did not meet.
Jeremy Meller (Children's Healthcare of Atlanta) has hired more AI literacy specialists than AI engineers. On ambient listening for nursing, the more experienced nurses are having an easier time, because the tool requires them to talk to the patient. Lisa Johnson: this is the time to double down on clinical informatics.
Will Landry is telling FMOL's 250 certified Epic analysts that he will not need 250 people building in Epic three years from now. At-the-elbow support on the floor is the work he tells them will last.
John Henderson (Rady Children's Health) spent a Saturday coding a check-in app for a middle school running club, then stopped. He could not support it. The club uses a spreadsheet.
Maili Boynay (Legacy Health): start with the people who have to deploy it. They need capacity, and they need to know what is in it for them.

In this episode:
Sarah Richardson, Principal, 229 Project
Julie Eastman, SVP and CIO, PeaceHealth
Lisa Johnson, VP, Clinical IT Solution Delivery, Providence
Falyn Curtis, VP, IS Clinical Systems, Ochsner Health
Will Landry, CIO, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System (FMOL Health)
Glynis Cowart, SVP and CIO, Woman's Hospital
Shane Thielman, Corporate SVP, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Scripps Health
Terri Couts, SVP and Chief Information and Digital Officer, Sharp HealthCare
Drex DeFord, Principal, 229 Project
Lacy Knight, VP and Chief Health Informatics Officer, Piedmont Healthcare
Josh Glandorf, CIO, UC San Diego Health
Bonnie Boles, SVP and CMIO, Tanner Health
Pete D'Addio, CTO and VP, Technology, LCMC Health
Steve LeBlond, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Prisma Health
John Henderson, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Rady Children's Health
Jeremy Meller, CIO, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta
Maili Boynay, VP, IS Applications, Legacy Health
Bill Russell, Founder and CEO, 229 Project

Key Points:
0:00 Four cities, one panel
0:46 One initiative to defend
2:36 Where the value shows up
7:46 The bad process, a hundredfold
11:19 Capacity
16:06 What did not work
18:45 Shadow AI
23:36 The people
28:02 Why these rooms exist

LinkedIn: 229Project
Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
30 min
October 14Last 3 Years Outgrew the Previous 20 | Executive Interview with Jim Jacobs
October 14, 2026: Jim Jacobs, President and CEO at MediQuant, sits with Bill Russell. Cold storage looks cheap until a team has to open the file. The last 3 years of MediQuant's own archive are greater than the previous 20-odd years, back to 1999. Bill asks what it costs a health system to leave an old system running.
Jim has seen the monthly bill go up after too much data moved to the cheap tier. The use case has to be planned before the data moves. Older revenue-cycle data can sit for retention. Imaging, DICOM, and sleep studies are a different cost decision. Leaving an old system on has a second login, a repeated test, and unpatched software when a team stops paying maintenance.
Guest: Jim Jacobs (MediQuant)
Key Points:
0:00 Margin Pressure on Both Lines
2:46 Not All Data Is Equal
3:25 MediQuant
5:09 Get Out Your Checkbook
9:28 Last 3 Years
11:48 What It Costs to Leave a System On
14:14 Just Turn It Off
16:56 A Good Engagement
19:08 Close

LinkedIn: 229Project
Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
20 min
October 08The Clerical Work Should Leave the Visit | The 229 Podcast with Michal Nedoszytko
October 8, 2026: Michal Nedoszytko, Member of Clinical Staff at Abridge, sits down with Bill Russell. He is a cardiologist. He practiced in Belgium and Poland for 17 years. As an intern he was making 50 lab sheets a day. He says a PDF generator took that from 25 minutes to about 2 minutes, and the cardiology department started using it. In 2013 the Ministry of Health in Poland required reimbursement amounts on paper prescriptions, from a spreadsheet of about 15,000 medications. He built a site for that. He says about 100,000 doctors a month still use it, almost 15 years later. He says 13,000 people applied to an Anthropic hackathon and he finished third with a post-visit tool he built between patients. He says Abridge shipped real-time voice chart pull about a month before this recording, and he credits Eric Topol with the term Keyboard Liberation. He says the clerical work should leave the visit, and the decision stays with the patient and the doctor.
Key Points:
0:00 Doctors who build
2:31 50 sheets a day
5:57 Between the STEMIs
7:33 15,000 medications
9:54 Still used, almost 15 years later
13:31 One hackathon, 13,000 applications
29:36 Keyboard Liberation
32:49 The patient and the note
35:35 The clerical work leaves the visit
37:29 The decision stays human

LinkedIn: 229Project
Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
40 min
October 077,500+ Experts. One Version of Clinical Truth | Executive Interview with Yaw Fellin
October 7, 2026: Yaw Fellin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Clinical Decision Support and Provider Solutions at Wolters Kluwer Health, sits with Bill Russell. Clinicians used to come to UpToDate for an answer. He is building that evidence into the workflow, including Epic's Art, with 7,500-plus expert contributors behind it. Bill asks what a CIO puts in place so every agent lands on one version of clinical truth.
At Becker's, a clinician using one of the large AI suites thought she knew every medication that patient was on. The system found one in the chart that was not on her radar. She changed the care plan.
Yaw's answer for a CIO is governance first, then room to experiment, as long as the experiments stay safe and get narrowed to the systems that can hold that layer. The closer is cognitive scaffolding: support a resident and a clinician who has been at it for 20 years, and leave the thinking with the person.
Guest: Yaw Fellin (Wolters Kluwer)
Key Points:
0:00 7,500+ Experts, One Clinical Truth
1:32 From a Destination to the Workflow
3:54 Wolters Kluwer
4:17 Evidence Inside Art
13:08 How the Clinician Knows
16:45 What a CIO Puts in Place
20:00 Translation in Five Years
22:50 Cognitive Scaffolding
25:17 Close

LinkedIn: 229Project
Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
26 min
October 01The First Acute System on Epic Orchard | The 229 Podcast with John McDaniel
October 1, 2026: John McDaniel, CIO at Trinity Health in Minot, North Dakota, sits down with Sarah Richardson. Trinity is the first acute system on Epic Orchard. The region is rural, about a 120-mile radius, and recruiting and educating an implementation team was the hard part. Epic handles the third-party contracts and the upgrades. Discovery replaced an RFP. More than 300 people, about 10 percent of the organization, took part. John says 97.9 percent chose Epic. He also says undercoded care was about $36 million a year. He chairs the AI council and can say no.
Key Points:
0:00 The first acute system on Orchard
4:16 Luma Health
5:32 Epic handles the contracts and the upgrades
7:38 Clearsense
8:26 Discovery instead of an RFP
10:02 A 10-year case approaches a billion dollars
10:29 About $36 million a year undercoded
13:06 Data owners sign off
13:58 The AI council can say no
16:03 $5 to $10 per encounter
19:43 Use the enterprise as an extension of DTG

LinkedIn: 229Project
Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
22 min
September 30$2.8 billion. Beyond the AI Demo: Proving What Works
September 30, 2026: Christopher Tyne, Chief Engineering Officer at Health Catalyst, sits with Bill Russell. Health systems are being sold AI that demos well and does not move an outcome. Chris puts $2.8 billion in validated outcomes on the table, then the test: do not just shine a flashlight at the fire. Hand them the extinguisher. Then check whether it is still burning.
Guest: Christopher Tyne (Health Catalyst)
Key Points:
0:00 $2.8 billion. Did it do anything
0:06 Chris Tyne, Health Catalyst
2:04 AI without the healthcare lexicon
4:03 Health Catalyst
4:34 100 million Americans without primary care
6:10 Mix of experts
7:44 Coumadin
10:00 The medical record starts giving back
12:08 Clients, exploration, trained models
13:48 Don't just shine a flashlight
15:52 Close

Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:
https://thisweekhealth.com/news/
17 min
September 24We Got Over 600 Ideas in a Week | The 229 Podcast with Derek De Young
September 24, 2026: Bill Russell sits down with Derek De Young of Epic, the research and development lead Judy named as owner of Agent Factory at UGM. What CIOs keep calling a low-code builder is still a development preview. Epic staff are building alongside the sites. Early adopter is a checklist at the end of October. GA is a Q1/Q2 goal. One webinar produced over 600 ideas in a week. Inova ran measles chart reviews 15 times faster and asked to share the agent. Two teams at the first build-a-thon built the same job: $1.10 a run vs 10 cents.
Key Points:
0:00 Agent Factory is still early
7:45 What's actually available
11:18 A code-status agent in production
20:13 Chart reviews 15 times faster
22:17 Take it, shape it, make it
24:14 Who should build
26:49 Cost, traces, kill switches
45:29 600 ideas in a week
48:53 What to do in the next 90 days

LinkedIn: 229Project
Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
55 min
September 23They Thought They Had 25 AI Tools. They Had 250
September 23, 2026: Christian Boucher (Healthcare CTO, Island) sits down with Sarah Richardson. He came into healthcare because his wife is a nurse. He watched clinical systems move to the browser while security got bolted on around them, and the workflows broke. One customer said they had 25 AI tools locked down. Island looked at every browser in the shop. 250. A remote clinical analyst team was waiting a minute to reach a usable EHR. On Island: 20 seconds.
Guest: Christian Boucher (Island)
Key Points:
0:00 They thought they had 25 AI tools
0:06 Welcome
0:56 Why the browser had to be rethought
5:09 Island
6:31 Browser as a control point
11:53 A minute became 20 seconds
16:21 25 tools were 250
20:17 What to ask an enterprise browser
21:20 Security that improves the experience
25:08 Close

Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:
https://thisweekhealth.com/news/
26 min
September 22Burning Man and the Tardigrade: When the Bad Thing Happens | Unhack the Podcast with Sarah Richardson
September 22, 2026: Sarah Richardson sits down with Drex DeFord for a special UnHack. No CISO guest this month. Drex is 24 hours off the Black Rock Desert and into the New Orleans regional staff roundtable, where three people told him they were there for the Burning Man stories. He answers how the city actually works. Then the picture he sent Sarah: a tardigrade on the playa. Heather Costa made that microscopic survivor the mascot for healthcare IT resilience. Same question the RSR afternoon is built on: what do you do when the bad thing happens, so patients, families, and staff still get care.
Key Points:
00:06 A Special UnHack
02:56 Fortified Health
03:30 How the City Works
08:38 Art, the Man, and the Temple
12:42 The Tardigrade
15:03 When the Bad Thing Happens

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:
https://thisweekhealth.com/news/
X: This Week Health
LinkedIn: This Week Health
Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
19 min
September 1756% Fewer IV Harm Events. 2,000 Hours Back to the Bedside | The 229 Podcast with Jennifer Jones, Kay Burke, and Rachael Hill
September 17, 2026: Jennifer Jones (former system CNIO and VP, Integris Health), Kay Burke (VP and CNIO, UCSF Health), and Rachael Hill (CNIO and Director of Clinical Systems, North Mississippi Health Services) sit down with Sarah Richardson. What changes when clinical informatics helps shape enterprise strategy from the beginning, not after the technology is already chosen. Jennifer's IV pump work cut adverse infusion events 56%, returned 2,000 nursing hours, and avoided about $500,000 in harm cost.
Key Points:
0:00 Why the CNIO belongs at the strategy table
4:20 Harmony HIT
4:50 Informatics in from the start
8:12 Don't design the hospital as an island
16:08 If we were designing this today
20:13 There were no nurses in the room
28:26 56% fewer IV harm events
31:20 AI acceptance is not generational
36:02 Go-live is not the ROI

LinkedIn: 229Project
Donate: Alex's Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer
43 min

About The 229 Podcast

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Some conversations are too important to stay in the room. The 229 Podcast, hosted by Bill Russell, Sarah Richardson, and Drex DeFord, continues the dynamic discussions from our community events,…

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The 229 Podcast

The 229 Podcast episodes

About The 229 Podcast