healthsystemCIO – Strategies for Hospital IT Leaders

Hosted by Anthony Guerra | Veteran Healthcare IT Journalist

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Episodes

1000

Latest episode

Sep 2026

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EN-US

About the show

Candid journalism and leadership insights for the modern Hospital CIO. healthsystemCIO is the definitive resource for Health System executives navigating Cybersecurity, AI Governance, and Digital Transformation. Hosted by Anthony Guerra, a veteran Healthcare IT Journalist.

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60 recent

September 14, 202638 min

Temple Health’s Lai Says Machine-Speed Attacks Leave CISOs No Choice on Automated Defense

Hugo Lai, Chief Information Security Officer at Temple Health – Temple University Health System, discusses why frontier AI collapsed the 30-day patch window and what changes when defense has to run at machine speed. He details the limits and monitoring every defensive agent needs, the security point of contact missing from most business associate agreements, and why a major outage reaches the C-suite as a denial-of-revenue attack.

September 9, 202655 min

RWJBarnabas Health’s O’Mahony Says Clinician Questions Made AI Deterioration Alerts Better

Stephen O'Mahony, MD, SVP and Chief Medical Information Officer at RWJBarnabas Health, discusses the clinical adoption work behind an AI deterioration warning tied to an 18% reduction in the risk-adjusted odds of in-hospital death. He details the concept-to-data mapping done with the technical team, the suppression logic that keeps the system quiet when clinicians already know, and the silent background testing that cut daily alerts to a volume rapid response teams could absorb.

September 8, 202644 min

Boston Medical Center’s Tadese Says Data Migration Time Governs Every Acquisition Timeline

Tinu Tadese, MD, System VP/CMIO at Boston Medical Center Health System, discusses Project Unite, the six-month integration that brought two former Steward Health Care hospitals onto a mature Epic build. She explains the MVP+ approach that lifted an academic build into community settings, the day-one data decisions that kept patients safe, and why conversion time is the constraint an acquisition timeline cannot compress.

September 2, 2026

Panelists Agree: For Lean IT Teams, Vendor Alignment Is the Ambient AI Strategy

Julie Demaree, VP, Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer at St. Mary's Healthcare, Corey Zeigler, CIO at Helio Health, and Carrie Weigand, MD, clinical advisor at Heidi Health, discuss how a lean IT department gets ambient AI into clinicians' hands. They cover buying at-the-elbow support instead of staffing it, the customization decisions that break vendor alignment, peer champions as the fastest training path, and who owns an AI model once it is live.

September 2, 202652 min

Northeast Georgia’s Paravate Says Ambient AI for Nurses Doesn’t Need the Legacy Go-Live Process

Chris Paravate, EVP and chief digital and information officer at Northeast Georgia Health System, discusses the five-week rollout of Epic’s Chart with Art to nurses and patient care techs at five hospitals. He explains why a tool that fails safely earns a lighter implementation, how 88% adoption in 30 days replaced a business case for the AI shift-handoff summary, and where operations must set the standard for mandatory AI use.

September 1, 202656 min

Health System CNIOs Say Nursing Workflow Differences Make Ambient AI a Steeper Climb

Cassie Marcelle, VP of clinical informatics and CNIO at UF Health, Marc Perkins-Carrillo, CNIO at Moffitt Cancer Center, and Lisa Stephenson, CNIO at Cedars-Sinai, discuss why ambient AI built for physician notes cannot simply be pointed at nursing flowsheets. They cover device platform gaps, nurses who use discrete fields as a checklist, super user programs with paid training hours, and governance built to remove flowsheet rows.

August 31, 202639 min

Dayton Children’s Whitlock Says Provider Experience Will Govern the Move to Epic’s Ambient AI

J.D. Whitlock, CIO at Dayton Children's Hospital, breaks down the ambient AI decision waiting at the end of his Abridge contract and the test Epic's Chart with Art will have to pass. He explains why nursing ambient means a second vendor and a second bake-off, what reported take-private talks at Workday would do to the EpicOps timeline, and how 20 clinical governance committees keep the call out of his hands.

August 26, 202643 min

CU Anschutz’s Dempsey Says AI’s Privacy Questions Are Familiar Ground in Behavioral Health

Allison Dempsey, PhD, PMH-C, Director of Technology and Data Governance at the Brain and Behavior Innovation Center at CU Anschutz, discusses why behavioral health met AI’s consent and privacy questions before the rest of the enterprise. She explains the response cost test she applies to every technology request, how Colorado’s new psychotherapy AI law added a mid-session consent step to ambient documentation, and what a one-page request does to governance cycles.

August 24, 202650 min

Mayo Clinic’s Overgaard Says Simulation Can Help Close the AI Translation Gap

Shauna Overgaard, PhD, Senior Director of AI Strategy and Frameworks at Mayo Clinic, discusses an emerging approach that tests selected AI tools in the simulation center, with standardized patients, before clinical use. She describes the workflow shadowing that changed how Mayo's review board weighs proposals, the exploratory work on bringing clinicians into evaluation, and a reliability cue in development for patients a model may serve less well.

August 19, 202650 min

Penn Medicine’s Regli Says Human Factors Work Curbs AI Usability Risk

Susan Harkness Regli, PhD, Associate CHIO for Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, discusses how human factors work protects clinicians from AI tools that pass technical testing yet fail at the screen. She details Penn's staged alpha and beta exposure, the usage data that caught one role accepting AI-drafted patient replies unedited, and why governance approval sets a six-month review date.