Is Good Friday a euphemism? Anyone who knows the basics about Judeo-Christian traditions understands that Good Friday was “good” in some respects and really NOT good in others. If you managed to sit through a particular Mel Gibson movie, you are struck by the not-good parts. At the very least, Good Friday isn’t a euphemism in the same way as “worshipping the porcelain god” – though they arguably both involve praying. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, I explain why prayer may be required to accomplish our health IT plans.
News from this week that will never be featured in a Mel Gibson film:
- The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the first government-wide policy to mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence (AI). There are only a couple of health care mentions, like removing “unnecessary barriers to AI” as CMS does when it uses AI “to reduce waste and identify anomalies in drug costs.”
- U.S. Senator Mark Warner introduced the Health Care Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2024, which would encourage healthcare providers to meet minimum cybersecurity standards to be eligible for payouts following cyberattacks.
- Price transparency data can help employers with their health plan decision-making, according to the Peterson Center on Healthcare and Manatt Health, who co-authored a Health Affairs Forefront article that included recommendations about how to improve healthcare transparency data.
In addition to the religious themes of this weekend, there is the age-old question that makes you want to go back to philosophy class: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Without going down a not-family-friendly rabbit hole (how’s that for continuing the non-religious Easter theme?), the point of this one thoughtful paragraph is to explain that it really doesn’t matter if the chicken or the egg came first. What matters is that chickens and eggs are all over the place, and we just need to deal with them. That’s why ONC released a draft of its Federal Health IT Strategic Plan this week. It acknowledges there are a whole bunch of chickens and eggs (“an array of tools that enable the processing, storage, access, exchange, and use of electronic health information”), and yet our system still isn’t working well. This is a good example of how times have changed – these strategic plans used to say “we just need electronic health data to be interoperable and it will all be ok” and now these plans are more like “yeah… so it is not that simple.” While we are still trying to figure out the complex set of federal health IT strategic plan objectives, it is good that we have moved past the original problem and onto recommending solutions. Does the plan really need to be this complicated, though? We may be past the chicken or egg conundrum, but now we need to figure out why the chicken crossed the road. Let’s all say a prayer so we can get to the chicken on the other side.
