The 229 Podcast

August 12, 2026: Marguerite Cunningham, VP/CNIO & VP Nursing at Inova Health, and Allison Morin, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Symplr, join Sarah Richardson to unpack how workforce management stopped being a scheduling problem and became an executive one. Maggie shares how Inova's Smart Square rollout, born out of pandemic urgency, forced the system to build real governance around staffing instead of just automating a spreadsheet. Allison brings the national view: predictive accuracy up to 97.5 percent, contingency spend cut nearly in half, and a shift from descriptive to prescriptive workforce management. 

Key Points:

• 01:22 Roles and Why It Matters

• 06:06 Governance Before Tech

• 13:08 Results and Future AI Staffing

• 19:42 Advice and Closing Thoughts

LinkedIn: 229Project

Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer

August 7, 2026: Bill Russell sits down with Eric Utzinger (Revuud) while Sarah and Drex are out. The H1 2026 Signal Index put competing priorities and not enough capacity at the top of the list for 54% of leaders — and 43% said budgets are flat or declining. On this Newsday they dig into why AI ROI still feels muddy: tools return hours, not line-item dollars, and the CFO still needs the exchange rate. Along the way: operational transformation with real proof points, growth without growing, and a hard look at who actually belongs at the strategic table — including Bill on why an outside-only CIO hire can be a mistake.

Key Points:

• 01:27 54% Competing Priorities

• 06:03 Dollars for Capacity

• 08:48 Tanya Townsend: Operational Transformation

• 15:08 Growth Without Growing

• 19:56 Mistake to Hire Me

• 22:12 Speak Business at the Table

LinkedIn: 229Project

Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer

August 8, 2026: Darren Bullock wears two titles at once, COO and CIO of Invision Sally Jobe Radiology Imaging Associates, a multi-state radiology practice, and neither role stayed in its lane for long. Darren tells Sarah Richardson how that dual seat let him fast-track one of radiology's most overdue fixes: a breast cancer risk model that finally works for women who aren't white. Together they also get into what it took to deploy it first, how he keeps his board from chasing every AI shiny object, and what separates radiology practices that will thrive from the ones already falling behind.

Key Points:

• 01:44 Dual COO CIO Role

• 04:02 Bias and Risk Scoring

• 07:32 Governance and Metrics

• 17:05 Future of Radiology

Bring color and joy to a child’s day: https://augustsartists.networkforgood.com/projects/166901-everyday-giving

August 05, 2026: Robert Forbes has spent 40 years in cybersecurity, from working on MILNET before the public internet existed to running the Air Force's high-performance compute center, to leadership roles at CA, Okta, and now Field CISO at SHI. Drex DeFord sits down with Rob to unpack why healthcare's AI moment is different from every other industry's. Rob introduces the concept of "minimum viable care," explains why agentic AI breaks the traditional non-human identity model, and shares the real story of an AI agent that deleted a production database while trying to log in. A candid look at governance, cost, and risk for healthcare leaders navigating AI right now.

Key Points:

• 03:21 AI Pressures and Threats

• 05:59 Minimum Viable Care Model

• 09:07 AI Governance Wake-Up Call

• 11:21 Wrap-Up and Community

Bring color and joy to a child’s day: https://augustsartists.networkforgood.com/projects/166901-everyday-giving

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

https://thisweekhealth.com/news/

August 3, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson are fresh off a run of academic medical center events in Chicago, and the number that kept coming up in every room was staggering: $900 million in projected revenue coming out of the healthcare system over the next three years. On this episode of Newsday, the trio unpacks what that pressure is doing to CIOs, CMIOs, and revenue cycle leaders alike, from Epic anxiety and AI idea overload to the physician who quietly found her health system hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a rare, unfiltered look inside three rooms most executives never get to sit in.

Key Points:

• 02:41 Rev Cycle Durable Value

• 07:58 Epic Shifts and Transparency

• 11:19 Data Foundations for AI

• 15:55 Governance and Prioritization

• 21:11 Executive Communication Wrap

LinkedIn: 229Project

Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer

June 31, 2026: David Finn has watched health IT security evolve from a compliance checkbox to an enterprise risk conversation, and now into an AI agentic era that's rewriting the rules again. Now teaching courses and advising across the industry, he unpacks what the recent OpenAI and Hugging Face breaches really exposed, and it wasn't a technology failure. It was a governance failure. David draws on decades of building security programs, including a stint as an "accidental CIO," to explain why healthcare keeps solving the wrong problem, why third-party risk is still underestimated, and why AI agents need constant behavioral monitoring instead of one-time guardrails.

Key Points:

• 04:42 Governance Over Controls

• 10:43 Pace Change: Get It Right

• 16:12 Third Party Risk Reality

• 20:34 Start With Executives

• 22:39 AI Jobs Policies Monitoring

• 37:56 Guardrails to Behavior Monitoring

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

June 30, 2026: John Helvey, CEO of SacValley MedShare, has spent five-plus years building one of California's leading regional health information exchanges. He sits down with Sarah Richardson to unpack why national data networks still fall short: patient-matching gaps, geofencing blind spots, and the 60 to 90 seconds patients and providers spend waiting for data that should already be there. John explains how his team is turning raw interoperable data into something clinicians can actually use, why health systems need better incentives to share, and what it will take to build a true patient-centered data home.

Key Points:

• 01:44 Why Interop Is Hard

• 09:17 Push vs Pull Data Sharing

• 11:36 Consumer Access and Identity

• 14:55 From Movable to Usable Data

• 20:06 Future Vision and Closing

LinkedIn: 229Project

Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer

July 27, 2026: Clay Maddox, Healthcare Horizon Practice Manager at CrowdStrike, to unpack a threat that's quietly reshaping healthcare security: adversary-in-the-middle attacks. These aren't your old-school man-in-the-middle exploits. Adversaries are stealing session tokens after a legitimate login, then pivoting straight into SaaS applications and browsers, no credentials needed. Clay breaks down the increasing supply chain risk and the identity problem everyone's still fighting, and what CrowdStrike's healthcare team is teaching in a free session on August 13th.

Key Points:

• 00:40 What Is Adversary in the Middle

• 02:03 Key Takeaways Overview

• 05:02 Who’s Speaking and Unified View

• 06:06 Register and Closing Thanks

Register for the Defending Against AiTM Attacks in Healthcare Webinar: https://go.crowdstrike.com/2026-08-aitm-healthcare.html?utm_campaign=stop_ai_accelerated_adversaries&utm_medium=evt&utm_source=prtn&utm_language=en-us

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

July 27, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson break down a week's worth of headlines, starting with Bill’s AI musings on the future "workhorse" models built for speed over depth. The conversation turns serious fast: healthcare doesn't own its AI platforms; it rents them, and that dependency carries real resilience risk. They dig into who's actually accountable when AI gets a clinical decision wrong, unpack the first fully autonomous ransomware attack, and revisit why CIOs keep reacting to agendas instead of setting them.

Key Points:

• 05:16 Platform First and Shadow AI

• 13:13 Owning the Harness

• 15:57 Mayo AI Safety Lawsuit

• 18:33 Autonomous Ransomware Agents

LinkedIn: 229Project

Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer

Picture this. You're the CISO at one of the world's largest healthcare companies, and Monday morning brings a call about a cybersecurity incident in a legacy diagnostics environment. Before the briefing even wraps, someone walks in with news of a second incident. Different system, different root cause, same day.

Drex breaks down why that scenario isn't hypothetical, using a recent real-world healthcare giant's dual cyber battles as the wake-up call. Between sprawling app portfolios, aging infrastructure, and an expanding web of AI-powered partners, the attack surface has changed and so has the shape of a breach.

So here's the question for your team this week. If two incidents hit at once, could you actually handle both?

Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid