Don’t be shy, come right up. She hates privacy! That’s what Saturday Night Live Weekend Update host Colin Jost said – joking about his wife Scarlett Johansson — at the White House Correspondents’ dinner a few weeks ago. In case you have been living under a rock and didn’t know they were married… yes, they met when she hosted SNL in 2006 but didn’t formally get it together until after Scarlett starred as the Black Widow Marvel comics character in multiple Avengers movies. Someone should tell Colin that the name black widow comes from the female spider’s habit of eating the male after mating. (They do have a child and Colin seems to be ok). In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, I explain why we should all keep Scarlett Johansson on our radar, but for health information technology-related reasons.
No one has to get eaten to appreciate the following news items:
- The AMA and numerous other organizations wrote a letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra requesting that UnitedHealth Group be solely responsible for handling the HIPAA reporting requirements of the cyberattack against Change Healthcare.
- HHS’ Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced a new cybersecurity defense program that will invest $50M in developing software that can identify technological vulnerabilities in hospitals.
- Tuesday Health, which has an app to help patients and caregivers self-report symptoms to help ease the transition from regular medical care to hospice at the end of life, just raised $60M from Valtruis, Blue Venture Fund, Mass General Brigham Ventures, and CareSource.
Scarlett Johansson’s character, the Black Widow, was so popular as part of the Avengers films that she got her own dedicated film, just like Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor. And yet, I am guessing that you didn’t see the film and don’t know that the original screenwriter is Jac Schaeffer. Jac, who is a talented champion of strong females in the film industry, happens to be the daughter of Leonard Schaeffer – former CEO and turnaround king of the then-almost-bankrupt health insurance company Wellpoint, which is now known as the doing-very-well-thank-you Elevance Health. You can read about how he is known as a “powerhouse for good” according to USC — the main beneficiary (but definitely not the only beneficiary) of his financial generosity and dedication to health policy research and thought leadership. We wonder what Leonard Schaeffer is thinking about what The Atlantic calls “OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson debacle” – where the company revealed a talking assistant as part of its new GPT-4o system, which sounds remarkably like Scarlett Johansson’s voice in the movie Her. If Sam Altman really did use a voice that sounds like hers when she explicitly declined to allow it, this may very well cause even less trust in AI than there was before. And while this may seem like an odd situation, I will quote the Black Widow herself in the Avengers: Endgame movie: I get emails from a raccoon….so, nothing sounds crazy anymore.
