The 229 Podcast

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.
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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

June 1, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson bring back the highlights from three simultaneous healthcare summits in Destin, Florida, covering imaging leaders, CTOs, and children's CIOs. The conversations were connected by a few uncomfortable truths: four in ten health systems cannot measure the AI they have already deployed, most organizations have dozens of agents running on their networks without anyone knowing, and budgets are getting squeezed by rising RAM costs and what leaders are calling the AI tax. From data literacy gaps and ungoverned agents to the idea of onboarding AI like a new hire, this episode captures what healthcare's sharpest leaders are actually wrestling with right now.
Key Points:
00:46 Summit Takeaways Setup

09:55 Agents and Governance Gaps

18:18 Proving AI ROI

22:31 Budgets, Vendors, and Wrap

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May 29, 2026: Asim Malik, VP of Health System Partnerships at DispatchHealth, joins Sarah to explore how high-acuity care is moving beyond traditional hospital walls. From pneumonia to COPD exacerbations, discover why this isn't just about convenience; it's about solving capacity constraints, improving margins, and giving patients back control. Asim breaks down the technology infrastructure, command center requirements, and clinical buy-in needed to make these programs succeed at scale.
Key Points:
02:01 Challenges and Solutions in Home-Based Care

06:53 Technological and Operational Requirements

09:46 Overcoming Barriers and Misconceptions

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May 25, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson turn the episode into an informal review of Sarah's MIT AI Strategy and Leadership course, and the insights are worth the homework. From the surprisingly perfect parallel between today's AI resistance and the original Luddites, to the counterintuitive finding that the organizations succeeding with AI are the most operationally aligned, not the most technically advanced, this conversation cuts straight to what healthcare leaders actually need to know right now. Lead with curiosity, start with clean data and aligned people, and remember that the real AI differentiator is not automation. It is velocity.
Key Points:
02:27 Inside the MIT AI Class

08:42 Trust and Leading Through Change

18:41 Operational Alignment Wins

22:52 Curiosity and X Teams

26:17 Courage and Closing

Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:
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Donate: Alex’s Lemonade Stand: Foundation for Childhood Cancer