Season 3 • Episode 60

A Lot of the AI Value Is Still Anecdotal | The 229 Podcast

Episode Description

October 15, 2026: The same AI panel opened four 229 Regional Staff Roundtables in September: New Orleans (September 10), Portland (September 15), San Diego (September 17), and Atlanta (September 22). Health system IT leaders on stage. Their teams at the tables. This episode pulls the four rooms together by topic.

Sarah Richardson opens it the way she opened Portland, with the Signal Check the room filled out before it walked in. In Portland, 65% named competing priorities and capacity as the top challenge.

Shane Thielman at Scripps Health went after cost, not revenue. Autonomous coding on emergency department facility coding. About a 50% decrease in the cost per encounter. About 70% coverage in certain areas of that work. It has since moved into professional billing for radiology.

A Piedmont physician built a mock ICU tracker on personal time. Fake patients, a personal AWS server, a GitHub account, so he could show what the tool should look like. He knew the governance. Lacy Knight: "something we can't support today."

Takeaways:

Julie Eastman (PeaceHealth) would defend the initiative that gives clinicians more time to be present with their patients, and that gives the evidence the time was truly returned. A lot of the value is still anecdotal.
Lisa Johnson (Providence): about five minutes saved per patient contact on the provider side, before the workflow was refined. An operational leader had set aside four to five hours to compare policies. Copilot did it in about 10 minutes.
Falyn Curtis (Ochsner Health) turned on Epic's billing assistant and saw fewer calls about bills, and more of those bills paid once patients could ask what the bill was for. Will Landry (FMOL Health) saw the same drop the day they turned it on. He put it at 60% fewer calls on that topic.
Glynis Cowart (Woman's Hospital): ambient listening has to be turned off for a phone call, or the conversation lands in the chart.
Lacy Knight: the EHR made bad processes obvious, and "AI has done that a hundredfold." The value is in rethinking the work.
Drex DeFord: take a train wreck of a process and it becomes a fast and efficient train wreck.
Josh Glandorf (UC San Diego Health): the bottleneck is operational transformation time, not IT time, "with much bigger boulders."
Bonnie Boles (Tanner Health) will not move a project until an EVP names the top three. Julie Eastman asks why AI is governed separately from the rest of the portfolio.
Same tool, different result. Epic chart summarization in ambulatory was not helping at Tanner. Clinicians found it slow, mistrusted a miss, and could not turn it off. Lacy Knight called the same tool a home run at Piedmont. Her first Copilot rollout went the other way: access went to people who do not live in Microsoft tools, and adoption was poor.
Will Landry chose not to block ChatGPT, so FMOL could see the traffic, including on guest Wi-Fi. Pete D'Addio (LCMC Health) is watching the token bill. Steve LeBlond (Prisma Health) treats shadow IT as a need IT did not meet.
Jeremy Meller (Children's Healthcare of Atlanta) has hired more AI literacy specialists than AI engineers. On ambient listening for nursing, the more experienced nurses are having an easier time, because the tool requires them to talk to the patient. Lisa Johnson: this is the time to double down on clinical informatics.
Will Landry is telling FMOL's 250 certified Epic analysts that he will not need 250 people building in Epic three years from now. At-the-elbow support on the floor is the work he tells them will last.
John Henderson (Rady Children's Health) spent a Saturday coding a check-in app for a middle school running club, then stopped. He could not support it. The club uses a spreadsheet.
Maili Boynay (Legacy Health): start with the people who have to deploy it. They need capacity, and they need to know what is in it for them.

In this episode:

Sarah Richardson, Principal, 229 Project
Julie Eastman, SVP and CIO, PeaceHealth
Lisa Johnson, VP, Clinical IT Solution Delivery, Providence
Falyn Curtis, VP, IS Clinical Systems, Ochsner Health
Will Landry, CIO, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System (FMOL Health)
Glynis Cowart, SVP and CIO, Woman's Hospital
Shane Thielman, Corporate SVP, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Scripps Health
Terri Couts, SVP and Chief Information and Digital Officer, Sharp HealthCare
Drex DeFord, Principal, 229 Project
Lacy Knight, VP and Chief Health Informatics Officer, Piedmont Healthcare
Josh Glandorf, CIO, UC San Diego Health
Bonnie Boles, SVP and CMIO, Tanner Health
Pete D'Addio, CTO and VP, Technology, LCMC Health
Steve LeBlond, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Prisma Health
John Henderson, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Rady Children's Health
Jeremy Meller, CIO, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta
Maili Boynay, VP, IS Applications, Legacy Health
Bill Russell, Founder and CEO, 229 Project