“I’m taking back Sundays.” Sounds good – Sundays are way too busy these days – but that’s not exactly the whole story to that line in the popular country song Lonely Road. It is a duet with Machine Gun Kelly and Jelly Roll, who remade John Denver’s Country Roads. The song was featured on last night’s People’s Choice Country Awards. [If you missed it, Shania Twain (“You’re Still The One”) looks a little different these days.] Jelly Roll is on tour, so he missed last night’s awards show, but I was thinking about this interesting man with face tattoos this week. I talk about why he is part of the digital health narrative in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
None of the people associated with this news have face tattoos, but they may have had a little work done to their faces like Shania Twain. Can you guess who?
- Only one of these powerful women will win this battle: Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Jane Fonda are on opposite sides of the California AI bill debate. California Governor Newsom will decide (in the next few days!) whether to sign or veto a broad-based AI bill that is considered the most significant AI safety legislation to date and a catalyst for the upcoming national debate about how to regulate AI.
- My former employers should take note – it would only take $2.7B to get me back. Google is rehiring its former employee, Noam Shazeer, by buying his chatbot company, Character.AI, for only $2.7B.
- Just in time to cook the turkey: Public comments on ASTP’s 2024 Draft Federal FHIR Action Plan will be accepted until November 25.
Could you imagine the national media attention it would get if … a plane was crashing every single day and killing 190 people? On January 11, 2024, the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee held a hearing featuring rapper-turned-country singer Jelly Roll about the fentanyl crisis. He testified that 190 people die every day from fentanyl-related overdoses, the equivalent of a packed 737 aircraft. Soon after, Congress passed the FEND Off Fentanyl Act. We need Jelly Roll to come back to lobby again. Right now, the HHS Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is being pressured to grant an extensionof pandemic-era telehealth prescribing flexibilities that would help treat fentanyl addiction, but the DEA may not due to the fear of misuse of controlled substances. And yet, the fentanyl crisis continues to be so devastating that 60 Minutes just did a story about it called “The Scourge of Our Time.” The Mom who lost her son to an accidental fentanyl overdose said, “At the rate that fentanyl is killing people in this country, it is absolutely ludicrous that this is not on the front page of every newspaper and every newscast daily.” This is all incredibly awful and not at all funny, so I will end this post with Jelly Roll telling some truly awful and not funny Dad jokes.
—
Are you going to HLTH this year? Let us know, we’d love to connect!
