Every day is a winding road. Sheryl Crow’s feel-good tune has a few lyrics that apply to our world at the moment. “These are the days when anything goes … every day I get a little bit closer to feeling fine.” The message: bewildering things are happening, it is surreal, it is not all great, but it may be ok. Now, if you’re a soulful, kicka** Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who survived both major health issues and romantic relationships with Eric Clapton, Owen Wilson and Lance Armstrong, these lyrics make a lot of sense. Feeling fine when anything goes, though, is an unlikely truth for people working on health tech policy issues. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, I (try) to connect the wisdom of Sheryl Crow to what is happening in the health policy world.
News from this week that Sheryl Crow is unlikely to notice because she is WAY cooler than we are:
- ONC published the 2023 HITECH Report to Congress, describing the actions taken by HHS to address issues related to the access, exchange, and use of electronic health information.
- The Department of Homeland Security’s CISA released a proposed rule requiring covered entities – including hospitals and health systems – to report cyber incidents, ransom payments made, and any substantial developments related to previous reports to CISA.
- The FTC released its Privacy and Data Security Update for 2023, highlighting the agency’s work to protect privacy. The update mentions AI and health privacy as key agency actions.
Sheryl Crow’s song, Everyday Is A Winding Road, is part of the soundtrack of the movie Phenomenon. It is one of those films that everybody forgets about despite featuring some of the best actors of our time (John Travolta, Robert Duvall, Forest Whitaker, Kyra Sedgwick). Artificial intelligence news this week triggered memories of the Phenomenon movie. The film tells a pretty great story about how an affable small-town car mechanic, George, has a medical condition that stimulates usually-untapped brain functions, granting him sudden genius-level skills, like the ability to break military codes, quickly absorb and speak foreign languages fluently, develop a powerful fertilizer, and improve solar panel designs. It is surreal, hard to believe while it is happening, and mind-blowing discovery after discovery without anyone knowing how to control it – which freaks out everyone, including doctors. Sound familiar? One item in particular, Microsoft and OpenAI announced that they are planning to build a $100B supercomputer called Stargate to power artificial intelligence. And while Stargate is not necessarily being built for healthcare-related AI, we also noticed that the CDC announced that it will apply AI to identify public health threats more quickly. This begs the question: what could the CDC do with a supercomputer like Stargate? The discoveries and possibilities are as endless as they are in the Phenomenon movie. Naturally, the academics and government try to control George and his mind-blowing discoveries, but he is ultimately allowed to share his wisdom in relative peace. These are the days when anything goes, so we will see how this AI phenomenon will play out. We have to wonder if another Sheryl Crow song will be our theme song for AI: My Favorite Mistake.
