“Are you the little boy from Home Alone? What did they do to you?” That’s my favorite laugh-out-loud line in the otherwise surprisingly dark first episode of the 4th season of Murders in the Building. Two brilliant additions to the cast this season are Eugene Levy and Zach Galifianakis (Martin Short calls him “Zach Galifragilistic” before wondering if he is “little boy from Home Alone”). While it is upsetting what they do to the great Jane Lynch (only click on that link if you don’t mind spoilers), I love watching these can-do-anything actors in this smart, dramatic comedy who-dun-it show. Obviously, the One Thoughtful Paragraph below is about how people can serve in many different roles, even in the health policy arena.
Who else is playing key roles this week in health IT policymaking:
- U.S. Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), co-chair of the Senate AI Caucus, introduced a package of AI bills, including one that relates to healthcare: The GUIDE AI Act. It would create a centralized data exchange center for biomedical data.
- The E.U. is ahead of the U.S. on health AI regulatory schemes, and there is a new overview of the 141 health AI-related policies that may help the U.S. get it together.
- California Governor Gavin Newsom is getting pressure to veto a controversial bill that would be the country’s most restrictive state law on AI-supported products, requiring companies to test their systems before releasing them to the public and allowing the state’s attorney general the power to sue AI makers for serious harm caused by their tech. Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, several other California Members of Congress, and plenty of industry groups are vehemently opposed to the bill.
I will always see Jane Lynch as Coach Sue from Glee (“I will no longer be carrying around a photo ID. Know why? People should know who I am.”). But she plays an awesome stunt double for Steve Martin’s character in Only Murders in the Building. Jane Lynch’s pivot to a dramatically different character roles is rivaled only by ARPA-H’s ability to switch roles from bank of Cancer Moonshot research to clinical health AI overseer. Indeed, ARPA-H announced this week that it will be joining a long line of character actors who seem to always be yelling “oh, pick me, pick me” in the we-are-totally-the-experts health AI space. ARPA-H’s plan is to test AI models before they can screw up humans’ health. ARPA-H cleverly calls it PRECISE-AI and describes it differently than I just did: a program to automatically detect and mitigate clinical AI model degradation. Well, just like the ever-growing Murders in the Building cast, the more the merrier. Coach Sue once says to her arch-enemy, the glee club director, “Oh hey William, I thought I smelled cookies wafting from the little ovens that live in your hair.” Like Coach Sue, I can smell things too — a bingeworthy TV series called “Only Murders By Health AI Tools.”
