Digital Health Talks - Changemakers Focused on Fixing Healthcare

Hosted by HealthIMPACT Live

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217

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Digital Health Talks is a weekly, no-BS podcast for healthcare leaders across the provider, payer, digital health, and innovation markets. Hosted by the HealthIMPACT Live team, each episode features candid conversations with the people using technology, data, AI, and new care models to improve access, patient experience, clinical outcomes, and the business of healthcare. For leaders deciding what to scale, stop, fund, secure, buy, build, and govern next. Hosted by the HealthIMPACT Live Team Megan Antonelli, CEO, HealthIMPACT Live Janae Sharp, Founder, The Sharp Index Shahid Shah, Chair, HealthIMPACT Live, Publisher, Netspective Media

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60 recent

September 30, 202629 min

From Published to Practiced: Closing the Gap Between What We Know and What We Do

Better evidence lands every year. The win is getting it to the bedside while the patient is still in the room, and that is now solvable. Cambrian Health turns a published guideline into a working protocol and surfaces the next right step inside the EHR, at the visit. First target is cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic care, where the first ever CKM guideline gives cardiology, nephrology, endocrinology, and primary care one shared framework to work from. Co-Founder and CEO Sarah Schmidt walks through what makes it stick: choosing the right patients for a protocol, assigning clear ownership so it stays current, closing the cost and prior auth gaps that keep proven therapies from patients, and building the CFO case for prevention. Pick the right patient population for a protocol before you build it Assign protocol ownership so guideline updates land in weeks Close the cost and prior auth gaps keeping proven therapies from patients Build the CFO case for prevention that survives a budget review Decide what to buy and what to build for clinical AI Sarah Schmidt, CEO, Cambrian Health Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 30, 202635 min

Closing the Evidence Gap: What Happens When Evidence Reaches the Chart

because the patient had two other conditions, or was seventy-eight, or was pregnant, and got excluded from the trial. Then they showed up anyway, and somebody had to decide. Brigham Hyde co-founded Atropos Health out of research that began at Stanford, where a doctor could ask what the data said about the patient in front of them and get an answer back in a day or two. This year that work moved into the EHR workflow itself. We get into what that takes. What a health system needs in place before go-live, who reviews the evidence before a clinician sees it, which specialties adopted first, and how the conversation with CMIOs has changed in three years. Know which clinical questions your literature tools answer, and which they never will. Understand what evidence in the EHR workflow needs from informatics before go-live. Learn how clinician review fits in without adding steps to the visit. Hear how CMIOs are evaluating this category right now. Brigham Hyde, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder, Atropos Health Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 29, 202645 min

Securing the Machine Workforce: Identity, Zero Trust, and the Recovery Plan for When It Still Goes Wrong with Ben Smith of SailPoint

Every AI agent a health system deploys is a new identity with standing access to clinical and financial systems, and most security programs were not built for a non-human workforce. As agents multiply, identity becomes the control plane, and leaders have to govern machine access with the same rigor they apply to people, before an auditor or attacker does it for them. But no identity program stops everything, and the systems that recover fastest treat resiliency as the other half of the same discipline: immutable backups that survive the attack, tested recovery playbooks, segmentation that contains the blast, and third-party risk that does not become an outage. This session covers both, how machine access gets provisioned, revoked, and governed, and how care comes back online in days rather than weeks when prevention fails anyway. Put a model to work for governing non-human identities with the same discipline you apply to clinical staff Implement zero trust built around real clinical workflow instead of bolted on after deployment See where standing agent access creates exposure most systems have not mapped, and adopt the backup and recovery architecture that holds if it gets exploited anyway Know the security, audit, and recovery terms to require from any vendor shipping agents or infrastructure into your environment Understand what a tested recovery playbook includes that an untested one misses, and how segmentation contains the blast so one breach does not take down the enterprise Ben Smith, CISSP, Strategic Agentic Technology Specialist, Sailpoint Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 28, 202644 min

From Hours Saved to Hours Reinvested: The AI Math Health Systems Keep Getting Wrong

Every health system has AI pilots. Far fewer have systems that scale past them, and the difference is rarely the model. Nicole Sanders and Christine Williams left large enterprise and platform roles to start Foxtrot Services, a firm built to take AI implementations from prototype into production in regulated, high stakes environments. They work across healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and supply chain, including the implementation work behind Surgence, the ecosystem connecting providers, distributors, and suppliers on shared supply and demand data. In this conversation they get specific about the call every CIO is weighing right now, whether to wait for the EHR vendor to build the capability or to move without them, and what it actually takes to convert saved hours into money. They also go at the part nobody puts in the case study: what compute and licensing cost at scale, why the architecture underneath determines the bill, and how permissions and governance break when a pilot becomes a system. Nicole Sanders, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Foxtrot Services Christine Williams, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Foxtrot Services Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 25, 202642 min

Direct Contracting Explained: How Northwell Direct Cut Employer Costs 20% | Nick Stefanizzi, CEO, Northwell Direct

Every health system that considers selling directly to employers hits the same wall. The discounted rate lands on patients you may already have, and nobody can prove the trade works. Nick Stefanizzi says it does. He is the CEO of Northwell Direct, Northwell Health's for-profit direct-to-employer company, where an employer or union agrees on price with the health system and no carrier sits in the middle. Since its first customer in 2022, Northwell Direct reports serving more than 300,000 employee members across more than 75 employers and unions, with a network that now spans more than 55 hospitals, over 125 urgent care centers and more than 5,000 behavioral health providers. In December, it signed the 170,000-member 32BJ Health Fund, the largest direct contract of its kind in the country, with the fund projecting 20% savings in year one. Stefanizzi told HFMA the business contributes more net-new volume and margin than it cannibalizes, and is profitable on its own P&L. Before Northwell Direct, he was chief administrative officer and interim CEO of Formativ Health, and spent eight years in operating roles across Northwell Health. How Northwell measures cannibalization against net-new volume, and how to run that analysis before signing anyone What a system should own outright versus rent, and what Stefanizzi says they deliberately chose not to build Why stop-loss economics turned into an unexpected sales driver Where technology actually produces the savings, since a lower rate alone does not lower total cost Whether any of this counts if the contract itself stays private For CFOs, CIOs and the executives weighing whether to become a network operator instead of a network participant. Nick Stefanizzi, CEO, Northwell Direct Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 22, 202637 min

Stop Building That. A CIO's Test for Buy, Build, or Partner with Edmund Siy

When Edmund Siy became chief information and technology officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health in May 2025, he told Becker's his opening move was cybersecurity and infrastructure, with AI to follow. Plenty of systems were pointing at pilots that year. He pointed at the plumbing. Fifteen months later the foundation is largely built and AI has stopped being a differentiator. Ambient documentation, governance committees, an AI officer on the org chart. Table stakes. Which means the hard call is no longer whether to adopt. It is where a forty seven hospital system spends its own engineering hours, where it co-develops with somebody else, and where it should admit a capability has gone commodity and just buy the thing. This is Edmund's actual test for making that call. Audit your build list. Anything three vendors already do well is payroll, not strategy. Fix the foundation before you scale AI. Infrastructure sets the ceiling on what you can safely deploy. Before signing a co-development deal, write down what you do when their roadmap slips. Put a review date on the three-year roadmap and name who is allowed to break it. Edmund Siy, FHIMSS, FCHIME, CHCIO, CDH-E, Chief Information & Technology Officer, Bon Secours Mercy Health Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 15, 202632 min

Ambient AI for Nurses: From Early Adopters to Standard Practice

Ambient AI earned its early reputation in the exam room, easing physician documentation. The bigger opportunity, and the harder build, is nursing. Geri Hansen, Vice President of IS Applications at Baptist Health and an informatics nurse by training, joins Megan Antonelli to talk about what it really takes to move ambient AI for nurses from early-adopter experiment to standard practice. They get into where it delivers value today, where it still falls short, how to prove ROI inside structured nursing workflows, and what separates a pilot that scales from one that stalls. A candid, operator-level conversation for the CIO, CMIO, and CNIO planning their next move. Geri Hansen, MSN, RN, NI-BC, Vice President, IS Applications, Baptist Health Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 10, 202631 min

Five Good Things with Janae Sharp and Megan Antonelli

AI in healthcare is starting to deliver on its promise, from Epic's ambient documentation tools to a new AI model pulling fresh insights out of routine sleep studies. Megan Antonelli and Janae Sharp break down the good news in healthcare technology this August, plus a few reality checks along the way. How Epic's AI-generated summaries and ambient listening tools are reducing documentation burden at Mayo Clinic, Parkview Health, and Riverside Health Why a recent study found burnout reduction from ambient AI wasn't as strong as expected How UC Davis is expanding telehealth access with a new tele-nephrology program and an at-home HPV testing pilot with Teal Health What Cleveland Clinic's new AI model can detect in routine sleep study data Why "AI slop" is becoming a bigger conversation in healthcare content and marketing, and what LinkedIn is doing about it Janae Sharp, Founder, The Sharp Index Megan Antonelli, CEO, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 8, 202641 min

From Roadmap to Runway: What Speed to Value in Healthcare AI Actually Takes

Every health system has an AI roadmap. Far fewer have a runway. Vendors sell the destination. Getting there, on time and on budget and actually live, is the part nobody demos. Scott Raymond, former CIO at Nebraska Medicine and a longtime health IT leader who still holds an active nursing license, gets specific on virtual nursing, predictive staffing and scheduling, the workflows you have to solve first, and why the gap between promise and production is where most AI quietly stalls. Scott Raymond, MHA, INF, BSN, RN,, CIO, CDIO Strategist, Prinicipal, Rouleur Healthcare Consulting Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.

September 1, 202620 min

Five Good Things with Janae Sharp and Megan Antonelli

A rapid-fire segment highlighting positive developments in digital health. Janae and Megan share insights on recent innovations, successful implementations, and emerging trends that are driving progress in healthcare technology. Learn about cutting-edge solutions improving patient outcomes Discover how technology is enhancing healthcare accessibility Gain insight into successful digital health implementations Stay informed about positive industry trends shaping the future of care Janae Sharp, Founder, The Sharp Index Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live Subscribe to Digital Health Talks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. Learn more about HealthIMPACT Live events, virtual forums, and healthcare leader conversations at healthimpactlive.com. Interested in being a guest, sponsoring, or joining the HealthIMPACT community? Visit healthimpactlive.com/digital-health-talks.