“In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night / No Evil Shall Escape My Sight / Let Those Who Worship Evil’s Might / Beware Of My Power, Green Lantern’s Light.” Yes, I just quoted the Green Lantern’s Oath from the worst superhero movie ever made. It would be an embarrassing way to begin a blog post unless you recognize that I was trying to find a quote – ANY funny, decent quote – from a Ryan Reynolds movie (he’s been in at least 66 films). Unfortunately, Ryan Reynolds has never said anything funny (or clean enough to be repeatable in mixed company). We give the Canadian kudos for persuading our most beautiful women (Scarlett Johansson, Blake Lively) to marry him, but that didn’t help Ryan’s film career. This situation – lots of activity, so little to show for it – is the situation we face in health information policy. Read more in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
More news proving that there is lots of activity, but no one is going to make a movie out of these things:
- Members of Congress sent a letter to CrowdStrike’s CEO requesting that he appear before Congress to testify about the company’s outage.
- The FDA’s Digital Health Center of Excellence (DHCoE) published a blog to explain the potential of leveraging lifecycle management to address the unique challenges of generative AI in health care while managing their inherent risks across the software lifecycle.
- The Sequoia Project announced the launch of a new Pharmacy Workgroup in collaboration with Surescripts to bring stakeholders together to identify solutions for shared data access and exchange challenges.
At my local theater today, I could go see the new Deadpool and Wolverine movie (with Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman) at 20 different times – or four different times if I felt strongly that the 3D version would enhance my experience. Really? The Marvel franchise people must think we are THAT desperate to get away from political fundraising ads right now. Maybe they’re right. And maybe that’s what is up with all this policy activity. Can’t they just leave us alone so we can watch the Olympics in peace? Personally, I would much rather watch Katie Ledecky win her 11th, 12th, and 13th Olympic medals than read CHIME’s new “future of healthcare” AI principles, or the University of Wisconsin’s and Epic’s report for policymakers about how to integrate AI into healthcare, or review our 6-page summary of the all-day HRSA National Telehealth Conference, or go to AHRQ’s Digital Healthcare Tools Webinar cleverly called “Medication Without Harm.” Regular health policy activity isn’t slow either – Kaiser Family Foundation just hosted an intense webinar about how health policy will change forever post-Chevron, and a whole bipartisan gang just pontificated about how to make site-neutral payments a thing in Medicare. All of this may keep me from having to suffer through the Deadpool and Wolverine movie, but I can get where the Wolverine is coming from when he says: I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice.
