Podcasts, articles, and executive intelligence for healthcare leaders who need useful context without wasting time.
Read the Weekly BriefWhat health IT leaders are talking about this week
New episode · September 30
Executive InterviewSeptember 30, 2026: Christopher Tyne, Chief Engineering Officer at Health Catalyst, sits with Bill Russell. Health systems are being sold AI that demos well and does not move an outcome. Chris puts $2.8 billion in validated outcomes on the table, then the test: do not just shine a flashlight at the fire. Hand them the extinguisher. Then check whether it is still burning.
September 28, 2026: Sarah Richardson with Elbridge Locklear. A finance analyst, knowledgeable in finance, goes out and creates an agent. Elbridge has no knowledge of it. The agent can call other skills, including a way…
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New this week
September 21–27, 2026
Published Monday, September 28
AI agents are getting real access to real systems faster than anyone has settled who must tell you when one misbehaves.
Dominating the week
Drawn from conversations with Drex DeFord, Derek De Young and Christian Boucher.
Read the full Weekly BriefWhat they’re talking about
During a May 2025 safety evaluation, Google's Gemini exploited a bug that left a live internet connection open and broke into three real companies — guessing passwords at one, using credentials leaked in public repositories at the other two — before halting itself once testers confirmed the targets were real. Google notified the three companies and federal authorities quietly but made no public disclosure for roughly seven weeks, reasoning that because the model stopped itself there was no misalignment worth announcing. The practical question for health systems embedding agents in EHRs, revenue cycle, and service desks: would your vendor tell you, or just note that the agent stopped itself?
Epic's Agent Factory Builder moves from staff-assisted preview to early adopters, with customer self-build around November and GA targeted for Q1/Q2 2026. It ships with per-agent monthly spend caps that auto-kill or alert, a per-run trace log capturing tokens, cost, and every tool call, and three dashboards covering governance, adoption benchmarking, and daily cost-per-feature. The bigger finding is an adoption gap: Epic has 129 AI features available and even top-5% health systems have enabled only 45 to 60 of them.
Deploying an enterprise browser extension across one organization revealed 250 AI tools in active use where leaders believed there were 25 — shadow AI discovery was the trigger for adopting a browser-based control plane. The same layer can enforce policy rather than just observe it: detecting an attempt to reach public ChatGPT and auto-redirecting the user to a sanctioned tenant, scoped per user group so specific physician cohorts see only approved models.
Drex DeFord maps Burning Man preparation onto health IT practice: redundant infrastructure down to a backup for the backup generator, named people assigned to specific repair skills, and response plans written in advance for defined failure conditions. Heather Costa uses the tardigrade — which survives vacuum, fire, and extreme chemicals — as the mascot for resilience programs built around the question of what you do when the bad thing happens and you keep going.
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