The 229 Podcast

October 28, 2026: Larger health systems are moving governance, risk and compliance work onto a single platform. Jay Stewart, Chief Revenue Officer at Meditology Services, sees what happens after the move. The platform may solve the problem "80, 85% of the way," and then the team customizes it. "And once you do that, you really start to lose a lot of the efficiency," Jay said.
"The technology is just one piece of that puzzle," he added. Automating without a good foundation does not help, so Jay wants the people and process work nailed down first, and that is where he sees many organizations asking for help. Skip that step, and the team has automated a process it never fixed.
Key Points:
00:00 Who Meditology Is

01:59 From Imaging Sales to Third-Party Risk

03:06 Meditology Services

03:31 Budget Scrutiny Reaches the CFO

06:21 GRC and the One-Platform Approach

07:55 Resilience and Third-Party Risk

09:37 Lab Services, Plan B, Plan D

11:20 AI Inside the Vendor App

13:34 Legislation and HIPAA

15:23 Tottenham and Close

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:
https://thisweekhealth.com/news/
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Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer

October 27, 2026: An application the physicians liked, still on Server 2012 and TLS 1.0, was offline the day after Dan Holland's team priced the risk. Holland, chief information security officer at Tampa General Hospital, had the math: $750,000 of annualized loss against a $100,000 upgrade. "Vulnerability is not a risk," Holland tells Drex DeFord.
Holland used the same math to set tolerance thresholds in Tampa General's risk policy and to inform the insurance limits the hospital doubled this year. Jim Bowie, his predecessor, now at Zscaler, opens the episode and hands Drex the $5 horse question. "You don't want to put a $10 fence around a $5 horse," Holland says. With limited resources, the dollar figure decides where the fence goes.
Key Points:
00:06 Jim Bowie

07:18 Fortified Health

07:51 Dan Holland

11:21 Vulnerability Is Not a Risk

20:27 Cyber Hero

27:46 A $5 Horse

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

October 22, 2026: Lori Boisjoli has sat at 229 tables as a CIO. Now she is joining 229Project as a Principal, and this conversation with Bill Russell is her welcome to the community. She learned BASIC in high school, took a coding job at IDX in Burlington, Vermont, and soon decided she could not just sit in a cube. She later became CIO of the six-hospital University of Vermont Health system, which went through a cyber attack nearly five years ago. Other CIOs still ask her to share that experience with their executives, sometimes to "scare the hell out of our C-suite."

Now she will host those tables, and she wants each room to leave with more than a takeaway: if a group agrees AI belongs in contract language, she wants that group to propose the language. That instinct goes back to Sharp HealthCare, where she spent the better part of nine months building the hospital side, and the team threw her a baby shower for her firstborn. "It is about the relationships," Lori said. For members, that means a host who was recently in their chair and wants every session to give them something they can use.

Key Points:

0:00 Welcome, Lori

1:03 Atlanta and the resilience panel

3:52 Restore by service, not by tier

5:07 Sharing the story with other C-suites

7:01 AI before joining 229Project

9:25 Agents that work while you sleep

11:31 Carve out time for innovation

12:53 From IDX and Allscripts to the provider side

16:27 "It is about the relationships"

19:20 What she hopes to build with members

21:08 Hosting the room

LinkedIn: 229Project

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

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

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