Is it ok to brag about a proud Mommy moment? Let’s say for the sake of this blog post that it is totally ok to give a shout-out to your kid when he does something impressive. My boy is the musical director of a college a cappella group (The Hulabahoos – organized nerd-singing at UVA). The proud Mommy moment in question is their just-released, totally professional, crazy good album on Spotify called Washed Up. Of all the ways you can avoid studying at college, cutting an album with your talented friends may be better than most. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, we explain how organized nerd-singing is related to health policy news this week.
Health information policy news from this week where no nerds were caught singing:
- The National Academy of Medicine released a Draft Code of Conduct for AI in health care – outlining common principles such as safe, effective, equitable, efficient, transparent, and secure, among others.
- U.S. House and Senate leaders announced a draft legislation titled the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024, which would create a preemptive federal standard to govern data privacy. The bill would give Americans the right to control where their personal data goes and who can sell it and establish mechanisms to hold violators accountable, including a private right of action.
- Lots of telehealth news this week: The U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing to discuss whether to extend expiring telehealth flexibilities for Medicare and commercial payers; more than 200 telehealth-related groups signed on to a letter asking the DEA to allow controlled substances to be prescribed through telehealth services, and a program that subsidizes high-speed internet access is expected to run out of funding soon – jeopardizing low-income patients’ access to telehealth services.
Some people are so good at what they do that the rest of us have no choice but to call them nerds, or we feel bad about ourselves. Pitch Perfect, the film that makes organized nerd singing at college cool, is a good and hilarious example of high-performing nerds. On April 11, 2024, another group of nerds who are less hilarious — the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) — held a meeting to hear from other nerds about artificial intelligence-supported health tools. These super-smart people have a tendency to make up new words so the rest of us have to learn them. For example, one guy who spoke at the HITAC meeting is Peter Embí of Vanderbilt, a doctor and professor who has too many titles to list here, contributed to our new dictionary with the word “algorithmovigilance.” I speak health IT nerd language relatively fluently, so I will translate: algorithmovigilance basically means “to monitor algorithms in health care platforms so they don’t do bad things.” Unfortunately, Dr. Embí didn’t stop there. He also introduced a new acronym: Vanderbilt Algorithmovigilance Monitoring and Operations System (VAMOS) – which is Vanderbilt’s “socio-technical system for real-time and team-based monitoring” – kind of like an air traffic control system for its health AI platforms. VAMOS also means “let’s go” in Spanish – and, yes, let’s go do something else now. Like listen to organized nerd singing.
Maverick Health Policy is hosting a webinar on Tuesday, April 16 to review health IT’s most important policy and industry news from the last quarter. Register here!
