The 229 Podcast

July 10, 2026: Bill Reid, Healthcare and Life Sciences Lead in the Office of the CISO at Google, has spent his career working with health system security leaders, and he keeps running into the same blind spot: healthcare is underestimating the browser as an attack surface. Drex DeFord sits down with Bill to explore why the shift from thick client infrastructure to a secure, browser-first endpoint model is no longer theoretical. It is what resilient health systems are building. From managing transient clinical staff to simplifying a fractured endpoint environment, Bill makes the case for why the browser is the future of healthcare endpoint security.

Key Points:

• 01:21 Browser Attack Surface

• 03:39 Resilient Endpoint Posture

• 05:40 CISO-CIO Conversation

LinkedIn: 229Project

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July 6, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson are back from four executive summits in Napa, covering CIOs, Chief Application Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, and CNIOs. The through-line across every room? AI pressure is intense, budget cuts are real, and a clear leadership vision is nearly impossible to find. From nurses being left out of decisions they should be driving, to analytics leaders managing a shadow IT explosion, to health systems already quietly building agents for referrals and claims, this is an unfiltered read on where health IT actually stands right now.

Key Points:

01:05 Napa Summit Themes

04:55 Nursing Wins and Workflow

07:22 IT Demand and AI Vision

13:20 Bright Spots and Agent Builds

LinkedIn: 229Project

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

Why the Browser Is Your Health System's Biggest Security Gap | Google Fridays with Andrew Rollo

July 3, 2026: Andrew Rollo, Sales Engineer at Google, has led browser deployments for organizations with 10,000-plus endpoints, with a dedicated focus on healthcare. Drex DeFord sits down with Andrew to unpack why the browser has become the most vulnerable and most overlooked tool in a health system's security stack. They cover how identity, update cadence, and extension governance define whether a deployment succeeds or fails, what a seamless day-one rollout looks like for clinical staff, and why blocking AI tools entirely is a losing strategy. Practical, specific, and built for CIOs who need answers, not theory.

Key Points:

• 01:54 Browser Security and Updates

• 05:25 Day One Success for Clinicians

• 07:23 CIO Checklist Identity EHR Network

LinkedIn: 229Project

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

Tala Joubert was 19 years old, living in an apartment in East London, and by almost every measure he was a ghost. Online he went by Earth to Star, or Brad, or Austin, running an amnesic OS that wiped itself clean on shutdown and routing everything through VPNs with the kind of operational discipline most professionals never manage to sustain. Investigators believe he was a core player in Scattered Spider, the crew behind more than 120 attacks including a string of ransomware hits across US healthcare, with $89.5 million in cryptocurrency traced to wallets under his control.

The investigators could see the wallets and watch the money move in real time, but they couldn't put a name or an address to the person holding the keys. Then they followed the money to dinner. Joubert pulled crypto from those same ransomware wallets to buy gift cards, used those gift cards on food delivery apps, and had the meals sent to his own apartment. Blockchain analysis walked the money from the ransomware payment straight to his front door.

Stay a Little Paranoid.

Jul 2, 2026:

Sarah Richardson, Lisa Johnson, and Tamara Havenhill-Jacobs spent thirteen weeks completing an MIT AI strategy course on planes, evenings, and what Tamarah calls her "AI Sundays." What they brought back wasn't hype. It was clear. In this conversation with Sarah Richardson, recorded live from a 229 CIO Summit in Napa, the two leaders get honest about what actually changed: how one built the confidence to defend AI's role to her board through a theological lens, why "can AI fix that" is the wrong first question, and the real difficulty of proving ROI on work that doesn't show up as hard dollars. A candid look at what intentional AI adoption actually requires.

Key Points:

• 00:29 Podcast Welcome From Napa

• 01:09 MIT AI Course Takeaways

• 08:24 Intentional AI And Governance

• 15:47 Culture Shift And Safe Sandboxes

• 20:29 Future Of AI In Healthcare

LinkedIn: 229Project

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

June 23, 2026: Jason Elrod, CISO at MultiCare, unpacks why traditional identity and access management doesn't map to AI agents, what happens when an employee leaves and their agents keep running with no one accountable, and why exploitability management is replacing vulnerability management as the right frame for security leadership. They also get into social engineering of AI models, the Harvard degree story, and what walk-up song Jason would pick for a 25,000-person keynote.

Key Points:

• 09:03 Managing Agents Like Employees

• 15:48 Agents Getting Phished

• 22:30 Exploitability Management Mindset

• 29:55 Speed Round

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

https://thisweekhealth.com/news/

June 29, 2026: Scott D'Entremont, CEO of Parlance, joins Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson to unpack the week's most pressing health IT headlines. The panel covers Mythos, the AI model just pulled offline after social engineering exposed its guardrail vulnerabilities. Then Scott brings 30 years of conversational AI experience to a sharper conversation: AI is flooding healthcare systems with auto-generated RFPs, turning serious vendor evaluation into a demo derby. Who's liable when clinical AI gets it wrong? And is the procurement process hurting buyers as much as vendors?

Key Points:

• 04:14 Clinician ROI and Patients

• 09:48 Liability and Governance

• 13:34 RFPs Demo Derby

• 19:06 Pricing Tokens Outcomes

• 29:33 Commencement AI Debate

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

https://thisweekhealth.com/news/

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LinkedIn: This Week Health

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

In February 2024, LockBit affiliates logged into their ransomware mothership and found it had been seized by the FBI and the UK's National Crime Agency. The countdown clock ran out, and the feds answered the one question LockBit spent years protecting: who runs this place? Dmitry Khoroshev, 31, going by LockBitSupp. Over $100 million in earnings. A $10 million bounty on his head. A clean win.

Except the criminal world didn't fold. It fractured. When affiliates realized the FBI had been living inside Hive and the Brits inside LockBit for months, trust collapsed across the board. Paranoid criminals don't quit, they scatter. Researchers counted 41 brand-new ransomware gangs in a single year.

Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid

June 22, 2026: Bill Russell and Drex DeFord launch into Newsday fresh off city tour dinners across Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Rochester. The two dig into what's actually happening with AI on the ground: a smaller health system that vibe-coded a nurse scheduling app and made it work while bigger systems looked on skeptically, the build vs. buy debate coming back with new energy, and Anthropic's announcement that Claude now writes over 80% of its own production code. Plus: the ROI reckoning that's coming for every health system spending on AI, and a big Abridge announcement on the horizon.

Key Points:

• 02:30 Build Versus Buy AI
• 10:55 Copilot Scale and ROI
• 21:37 Mythos and Security
• 25:25 Ambient AI Market Moves

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 18, 2026: Shiv Rao, Co-founder and CEO of Abridge, has spent eight years building the company into something most people didn't see coming. Now live in 300+ health systems, touching 250 million patients and processing over 100 million clinical conversations a year. But Shiv isn't just a technologist. He still rounds at UPMC as a practicing cardiologist, and that dual lens shapes everything about how he thinks. In this conversation with Bill Russell, Shiv reframes what Abridge actually is: not an AI scribe, but computable infrastructure. The clinical conversation sits upstream of every workflow in healthcare, and what Abridge is building is the platform that proves it.

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

https://thisweekhealth.com/news/

Key Points:

• 01:41 Big Announcement Beyond Notes

• 06:29 Unified Patient Intelligence

• 10:52 Enterprise AI and Trust

• 15:59 Coalition With Payers and NVIDIA

• 35:27 So What and Closing Bets

X: This Week Health

LinkedIn: This Week Health

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