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What health IT leaders are talking about this week

New episode · October 12

Newsday

I Don't Always Patch. When I Do, It's in Production. | Newsday with 229Project

October 12, 2026: Bill Russell and Drex DeFord. A weaponized package is about $700, so the fix is going straight into production, with the rollback as the safety net.

Episode details

Weekly Brief

New this week

September 28 – October 4, 2026

Published Tuesday, October 6

The governance gap is now an ownership gap: AI agents are running in production that no named human is accountable for, while the cheapest attack on health systems is still a phone call to the help desk.

Dominating the week

  • Agentic AI ownership
  • Help desk identity verification
  • Epic Orchard for rural systems
  • Proving AI value

Drawn from conversations with Sarah Richardson, John McDaniel, Drex DeFord and Christopher Tyne.

Read the full Weekly Brief

What they’re talking about

  1. 01

    Agentic AI is already in production without IT's knowledge, so the governance question has shifted from policy to named ownership.

    A survey of 250 leaders found 28% already run agentic AI in production and 44% are piloting, while 72% admit tools or agents were deployed without formal IT approval — and a separate figure showing 86% confident they can govern AI looks hollow against the fact that most organizations lack a current AI inventory. The proposed fix is to treat every agent like an employee: an identifiable human owner accountable for its access and actions, with authentication (who it is) separated from authority (what it may do). At Trinity Health, that accountability is concentrated in an AI council spanning CIO, CEO, COO, CSO, CMIO and physicians, where the CIO holds personal veto power over any deployment.

  2. 02

    Scattered Spider's hospital breaches required no exploit — just a help desk employee who skipped verification under pressure.

    The group's core method was vishing: calling help desks impersonating locked-out employees to get passwords reset or MFA prompts approved, and it was used against hospitals including some of the largest U.S. health systems as far back as 2024. Prosecutors tie at least a dozen companies and 29 victims to the crew, with single incidents netting $6.3M and $1.7M. The test for leaders is not whether the verification policy exists but whether staff actually follow it when a caller claims to be a clinician in urgent need.

  3. 03

    AI value claims should be judged on whether the fix was measured, not whether the demo worked — and workflows resist generalization more than vendors admit.

    The useful vendor test is a three-stage demand: flag the problem, recommend the specific fix, then measure whether the fix actually resolved it. Generic tooling breaks on clinical specificity — off-the-shelf ambient scribing misreads medication names and can't separate patient from physician speech, and a single Coumadin refill-check workflow needed 100–200 distinct checks against 30–40 for typical medications, forcing a separate product line. Trinity's counterpoint is that administrative AI pays reliably: pre-implementation revenue cycle analysis found roughly $36 million a year in undercoding, and ambient documentation is projected to add $5–$10 per encounter in captured reimbursement.

  4. 04

    Epic's new Orchard model puts a rural system on Foundation with Epic managing third-party contracts and upgrades — and the hard prerequisite is data, not software.

    Trinity Health in Minot, North Dakota is the first acute care system on Orchard, a SaaS-driven Foundation variant built for smaller systems without implementation bench strength. Getting there required 13 rounds of data cleanup during the Workday implementation to resolve fragmented and duplicate legacy records, plus a data lake and named data owners who must approve any change in their domain; duplicate medical record rates are now under 2% ahead of go-live. Selection skipped the traditional RFP: vendors spent weeks embedded in departments before proposing anything, and 300-plus staff — about 10% of the organization — produced a 97.9% preference for Epic.

Recent guests

Yaw Fellin
SVP & GM, UpToDate
John McDaniel
CIO
Christian Boucher
Healthcare CTO
Kay Burke
VP, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer
Jennifer Jones
CNIO & VP of Business Partenerships
Rachael Hill
CNIO/Director of Clinical Systems
Sherri Hess
CNIO
Russell Teague
Chief Information Security Officer
Cathy Patterson
Chief Nursing Information Officer
Victoria Sergent
Chief Nursing Informatics Officer
Diane Constantine
Senior Director, Enterprise Health Informatics
Lindsey Bengfort
Managing Director, Healthcare
CT Lin
CMIO
Allison Morin MSN
CNIO
Marguerite Cunningham
CNIO
Eric Utzinger
Co-Founder & CCO
Darren Bullock
Chief Operating & Chief Information Officer
Clay Maddux
Horizon Practice Director, U.S. Healthcare
Liz Scott
Co-Executive Director
Matt Troup
Clinical Strategy Principal
Sebastian Estades
Sr. Account Executive - Google Platforms & Devices
Everett Weiss
CMIO
Adam Hawkins
EVP, Healthcare
Andy Rollo
Sales Engineer
Yaw Fellin
SVP & GM, UpToDate
John McDaniel
CIO
Christian Boucher
Healthcare CTO
Kay Burke
VP, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer
Jennifer Jones
CNIO & VP of Business Partenerships
Rachael Hill
CNIO/Director of Clinical Systems
Sherri Hess
CNIO
Russell Teague
Chief Information Security Officer
Cathy Patterson
Chief Nursing Information Officer
Victoria Sergent
Chief Nursing Informatics Officer
Diane Constantine
Senior Director, Enterprise Health Informatics
Lindsey Bengfort
Managing Director, Healthcare
CT Lin
CMIO
Allison Morin MSN
CNIO
Marguerite Cunningham
CNIO
Eric Utzinger
Co-Founder & CCO
Darren Bullock
Chief Operating & Chief Information Officer
Clay Maddux
Horizon Practice Director, U.S. Healthcare
Liz Scott
Co-Executive Director
Matt Troup
Clinical Strategy Principal
Sebastian Estades
Sr. Account Executive - Google Platforms & Devices
Everett Weiss
CMIO
Adam Hawkins
EVP, Healthcare
Andy Rollo
Sales Engineer

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