The 229 Podcast

August 7, 2026: Bill Russell sits down with Eric Utzinger (Revuud) while Sarah and Drex are out. The H1 2026 Signal Index put competing priorities and not enough capacity at the top of the list for 54% of leaders — and 43% said budgets are flat or declining. On this Newsday they dig into why AI ROI still feels muddy: tools return hours, not line-item dollars, and the CFO still needs the exchange rate. Along the way: operational transformation with real proof points, growth without growing, and a hard look at who actually belongs at the strategic table — including Bill on why an outside-only CIO hire can be a mistake.
Key Points:
01:27 54% Competing Priorities

06:03 Dollars for Capacity

08:48 Tanya Townsend: Operational Transformation

15:08 Growth Without Growing

19:56 Mistake to Hire Me

22:12 Speak Business at the Table

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

August 8, 2026: Darren Bullock wears two titles at once, COO and CIO of Envision Sally Jobe Radiology Imaging Associates, a multi-state radiology practice, and neither role stayed in its lane for long. Darren tells Sarah Richardson how that dual seat let him fast-track one of radiology's most overdue fixes: a breast cancer risk model that finally works for women who aren't white. Together they also get into what it took to deploy it first, how he keeps his board from chasing every AI shiny object, and what separates radiology practices that will thrive from the ones already falling behind.
Key Points:
01:44 Dual COO CIO Role

04:02 Bias and Risk Scoring

07:32 Governance and Metrics

17:05 Future of Radiology

Bring color and joy to a child’s day: https://augustsartists.networkforgood.com/projects/166901-everyday-giving

August 05, 2026: Robert Forbes has spent 40 years in cybersecurity, from working on MILNET before the public internet existed to running the Air Force's high-performance compute center, to leadership roles at CA, Okta, and now Field CISO at SHI. Drex DeFord sits down with Rob to unpack why healthcare's AI moment is different from every other industry's. Rob introduces the concept of "minimum viable care," explains why agentic AI breaks the traditional non-human identity model, and shares the real story of an AI agent that deleted a production database while trying to log in. A candid look at governance, cost, and risk for healthcare leaders navigating AI right now.
Key Points:
03:21 AI Pressures and Threats

05:59 Minimum Viable Care Model

09:07 AI Governance Wake-Up Call

11:21 Wrap-Up and Community

Bring color and joy to a child’s day: https://augustsartists.networkforgood.com/projects/166901-everyday-giving
Keep up to date on the latest in health IT:
https://thisweekhealth.com/news/

August 3, 2026: Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson are fresh off a run of academic medical center events in Chicago, and the number that kept coming up in every room was staggering: $900 million in projected revenue coming out of the healthcare system over the next three years. On this episode of Newsday, the trio unpacks what that pressure is doing to CIOs, CMIOs, and revenue cycle leaders alike, from Epic anxiety and AI idea overload to the physician who quietly found her health system hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a rare, unfiltered look inside three rooms most executives never get to sit in.
Key Points:
02:41 Rev Cycle Durable Value

07:58 Epic Shifts and Transparency

11:19 Data Foundations for AI

15:55 Governance and Prioritization

21:11 Executive Communication Wrap

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

June 31, 2026: David Finn has watched health IT security evolve from a compliance checkbox to an enterprise risk conversation, and now into an AI agentic era that's rewriting the rules again. Now teaching courses and advising across the industry, he unpacks what the recent OpenAI and Hugging Face breaches really exposed, and it wasn't a technology failure. It was a governance failure. David draws on decades of building security programs, including a stint as an "accidental CIO," to explain why healthcare keeps solving the wrong problem, why third-party risk is still underestimated, and why AI agents need constant behavioral monitoring instead of one-time guardrails.
Key Points:
04:42 Governance Over Controls

10:43 Pace Change: Get It Right

16:12 Third Party Risk Reality

20:34 Start With Executives

22:39 AI Jobs Policies Monitoring

37:56 Guardrails to Behavior Monitoring

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