The 229 Podcast

June 5, 2026: Bree Bacon doesn't just talk about burnout; she survived it. Author, Speaker, & Elite Energy™ Coach, Bree spent years giving 110% to everything until panic attacks and her miscarriage forced her to crash. What she discovered in the aftermath became a life-saving framework that challenges everything healthcare leaders think they know about performance, capacity, and sustainable success. Elite Energy isn't just a theory; it’s tested through fertility loss, chemotherapy, and the impossible choice between career and survival.
Key Points:
02:54 The Reality of Burnout

07:37 Bree's Personal Journey with Healthcare

10:52 The Elite Energy Framework

21:07 Overcoming Cancer and Embracing Life

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June 3, 2026: Adnan Iqbal, co-founder and CEO of Luma Health, joins Bill Russell for a direct conversation about one of healthcare's most stubborn problems: patient access. With 14-day average waits for a PCP appointment, 18% no-show rates, and call centers buried in fax workflows, the problems haven't changed, but the tools finally have. Adnan shares how Luma built a platform from scratch to orchestrate access, intake, financial experience, and patient engagement in one unified system, why deep EHR integration separates real solutions from the AI noise, and how health systems are seeing 50% top-line revenue growth by solving access first.
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Key Points:
03:59 From Waitlist to AI

10:14 Omnichannel and Escalations

12:35 Governance and ROI

19:38 Platform Future Wrap

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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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