“It would be impossible for me to care any less about what you are tired of.” Apologies for the hostility on a Friday – it is just an apt movie quote. Specifically, that is the awesome retort of Bobby Seale to the openly biased judge in The Trial of the Chicago 7 – a movie about anti-Vietnam protesters being unjustly prosecuted. It is the large, supportive mob outside the courtroom that can be associated with a big news item in health care this week. I make the connection for you in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
Other mob-like behavior in the news this week:
- HHS is ganging up on cyberterrorists: HHS’ Office of Information Security is warning the health sector about Godzilla Webshell, a publicly available technology that can manipulate files and poses a serious threat to healthcare entities. Also, ASPR launched the Public Health Cybersecurity Readiness Survey, an anonymous survey that is designed to assess the cybersecurity preparedness of public health agencies to inform grant funding and policy recommendations.
- A group of health systems led by Mass General Brigham is launching the Healthcare AI Challenge Collaborative, which will allow clinicians to test AI offerings against each other in simulated clinical settings.
- The American College of Radiology created an AI quality registry that will monitor AI performance to inform future algorithms and create performance results that show how systems operate over time.
In the movie The Trial of the Chicago 7, the mob outside the courtroom chanted, “THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.” Another mob of protestors is among the record-breaking 38,000 commenters sent to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”) about their wildly unpopular proposed rules to restrict telehealth providers from prescribing controlled substances. So this week, it finally decided to allow telehealth providers to continue to prescribe things like buprenorphine for opioid use disorder and Adderall without an in-person visit – but only for one more year. In fact, the DEA has been dragging its feet since 2008 to create safeguards for telehealth prescribing and instead would rather prohibit it out of concern for too-easy access to narcotics. The incoming Trump administration (including, apparently, RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, if new rules can dodge DOGE – the “Department of Government Efficiency”) will have to determine how to transition post-pandemic telemedicine prescribing. Things are certainly dramatic at the moment – is “this what revolution looks like?”
