The 229 Podcast

A dormant Instagram account tied to the Obama White House started posting pro-Iranian content. No hacked password. No malware. No phishing email. Just a polite conversation with Meta's AI support agent.

Researchers are calling it out plainly: AI agents are built to be helpful, and that eagerness is exactly what attackers are starting to exploit. The attack surface isn't the password anymore -- it's the agent.

Health systems are deploying AI right now for scheduling, intake, and benefit verification. Has anyone on your team actually tried to socially engineer yours?

Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid

Thanks to Cyderes for sponsoring this episode: https://thisweekhealth.com/partners/cyderes/

June 15, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson sit down to work through the question sitting at the top of every health system's agenda: what has AI actually done for us? Personal productivity gains are real. Meeting counts are dropping, hours are being saved, and individual leaders feel the difference. But the enterprise ROI case is proving harder to make. With Dave Lundahl's three-era framework for healthcare IT adding historical weight and the ambient listening wave cresting, the industry may be entering its accountability phase.

Key Points:

• 04:22 Governance Five Questions

• 08:08 Cost ROI And Licenses

• 10:04 Third Era Of Health IT

• 17:49 Patient Companion Future

• 23:47 Wrap Up And Next Week

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

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June 10, 2026: In healthcare where downtime means lives, identity security is no longer just about who logs in. Bill Russell sits down with Peter Barker, Chief Product Officer at Ping Identity, to unpack why the agentic AI era demands a fundamental rethinking of identity. From giving AI agents first-class credentials to shifting the security boundary from login to the point of action. If your health system is deploying AI and you have not addressed non-human identity, this conversation is where to start.

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

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Key Points:

• 01:18 Why Agents Change Identity

• 07:43 Runtime Identity And Authorization

• 15:00 Healthcare Passwordless Trust

• 20:11 CISO Playbook And Wrap Up

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That UAC prompt -- the little shield asking you to approve a publisher -- is one of the most foundational trust signals in Windows security. Your tools rely on it. Your team relies on it.

Two people figured out how to sell it. What they built, and which ransomware gangs bought access, has a direct line to at least one recent health system breach. Drex breaks it down.

Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid

CISA -- the federal agency whose job it is to protect America's critical infrastructure -- had its own internal credentials sitting in a public GitHub repository for six months. Plain text passwords. AWS GovCloud keys. SSH access tokens. Visible to anyone on the internet with a browser.What makes this worse: the contractor who created the repository didn't slip up accidentally. They actively disabled the default GitHub protections designed to prevent exactly this from happening. And when the repository finally came down, those AWS keys stayed valid for another 48 hours before anyone thought to revoke them.Drex brings this back to the question every health system CISO should be sitting with: How many contractors have access to your most sensitive systems right now -- and if one of them made this choice six months ago, would you even know today?Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ThisWeekHealth Twitter: https://twitter.com/thisweekhealth Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer - https://www.alexslemonade.org/mypage/3173454

June 8, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson break down three headlines every health IT leader needs to hear. New York City Health and Hospitals suffered a breach that exposed biometric data, fingerprints, palm prints, and geotagged photo metadata through a third-party vector. Unlike passwords or Social Security numbers, that data cannot be replaced. Second, the long-anticipated HIPAA Security Rule update is overdue, and organizations that had two years to prepare are still unprepared. Lastly, Microsoft burned through its entire AI budget in five months. As AI spending spirals, the panel asks the harder question: Does every AI project reduce spend or increase revenue? If not, why is it funded?

Key Points:

• 02:31 Biometric Breach Fallout

• 10:41 Data Retention and Hoarding

• 12:59 HIPAA Security Rule Update

• 21:10 AI Spend and ROI Reality

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

https://thisweekhealth.com/news/

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June 5, 2026: Bree Bacon doesn't just talk about burnout; she survived it. Author, Speaker, & Elite Energy™ Coach, Bree spent years giving 110% to everything until panic attacks and her miscarriage forced her to crash. What she discovered in the aftermath became a life-saving framework that challenges everything healthcare leaders think they know about performance, capacity, and sustainable success. Elite Energy isn't just a theory; it’s tested through fertility loss, chemotherapy, and the impossible choice between career and survival.

Key Points:

• 02:54 The Reality of Burnout

• 07:37 Bree's Personal Journey with Healthcare

• 10:52 The Elite Energy Framework

• 21:07 Overcoming Cancer and Embracing Life

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June 3, 2026: Adnan Iqbal, co-founder and CEO of Luma Health, joins Bill Russell for a direct conversation about one of healthcare's most stubborn problems: patient access. With 14-day average waits for a PCP appointment, 18% no-show rates, and call centers buried in fax workflows, the problems haven't changed, but the tools finally have. Adnan shares how Luma built a platform from scratch to orchestrate access, intake, financial experience, and patient engagement in one unified system, why deep EHR integration separates real solutions from the AI noise, and how health systems are seeing 50% top-line revenue growth by solving access first.

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

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Key Points:

• 03:59 From Waitlist to AI

• 10:14 Omnichannel and Escalations

• 12:35 Governance and ROI

• 19:38 Platform Future Wrap

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June 2, 2026: Crystal Broj, Enterprise CDTO at MUSC, is an IT executive, Becker's 2026 Digital Officer to Know, and Top 50 Women Leaders in Healthcare honoree who has built her career on one core belief: start with the problem, not the technology. In this episode of Flourish, Sarah Richardson sits down with Crystal to explore what it really takes to lead complex change, develop talent that outlasts you, and call out AI hype for what it is. From growing a team of one to ten at MUSC, to sharing the Lotus Notes failure that shaped her career, Crystal brings candor, energy, and a rare clarity to what great leadership actually looks like in healthcare today.

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:

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Key Points:

• 01:31 Leadership Energy and Mentorship

• 11:37 Building Talent and Team Rhythm

• 21:01 Vendor Partnerships and Pushback

• 26:33 Career Growth and Final Takeaways

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In late 2025, cyber attackers slipped into New York City Health + Hospitals through a third-party vendor and stayed undetected for nearly three months. When they left, they took more than records and Social Security numbers. They took fingerprints and palm prints -- biometric data belonging to some of the most vulnerable patients in the country.

You can cancel a credit card. You can get a new password. You can even navigate a stolen SSN. You cannot get new fingerprints. What walked out of that network in November is permanent.

Drex uses this breach to ask a question every health system needs to answer right now: do you actually know where your biometric data lives, who can reach it, and what protections are in place? Badge readers, palm vein scanners, EHR workstations -- the collection has grown fast. The mapping hasn't kept up.

Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid