Digital Health Talks - Changemakers Focused on Fixing Healthcare

HealthIMPACT Live

Details

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

Recent Episodes

SEP 30, 2026
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.
29 MIN
SEP 29, 2026
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.
45 MIN
SEP 28, 2026
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.
44 MIN
SEP 25, 2026
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.
42 MIN