The 229 Podcast

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

July 24, 2026: Dr. Jen McKay spent 20-plus years as an internal medicine hospitalist in rural South Dakota before becoming CMIO at a major Midwest health system, and now she's the Senior Clinical Specialist at Google for Health. Jen explains why so many AI governance efforts stall out, and it usually comes down to one missing ingredient: clinical leadership at the table from day one. She unpacks why physicians serve as the real "API" between fragmented healthcare data inputs, whether AI will ever replace doctors, and what she'd tell a CMIO whose organization is adopting AI faster than policy can keep up with.
Key Points:
03:16 Where Governance Fails

05:12 Humans Are the API

06:17 Will AI Replace Doctors?

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: 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 23, 2026: Liz Scott is the co-executive director of Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation, founded by her daughter, Alex, a four-year-old cancer patient who promised to raise money for kids "like her." What started as a single lemonade stand has grown into a movement with over 15,700 community fundraisers and hundreds of research grants funded every year. Bill Russell and Sarah Richardson sit down with Liz to explore how a pure, tragic story became a national movement, what a $100 donation actually funds a decade later, and why she still hasn't burned out after 20 years of building something bigger than grief.
Key Points:
01:56 Alex Story Spark

12:06 Super Sibs Support

20:01 Research And Grants

25:10 Leadership And Future

LinkedIn: 229Project
Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer