“Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.” Darth Vader says this to Admiral Motti, an unlikeable man that is part of the Empire’s committee to determine how to use the Death Star to crush the Rebellion in the first Star Wars movie. If you’re too young to know much about the 1977 Star Wars film A New Hope, I am sorry, but we all have our burdens to bear. The good news is that your generation has a magical ability to watch old movies whenever you want to, so maybe understand what is important in life and get familiar with this film right away. In the meantime, the One Thoughtful Paragraph below will explain how the FDA is inventing a committee to review the latest technological terrors in health care.
The following are some news highlights from this week that make it clear some people do not underestimate the power of the Force:
- The forceful U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted on the bipartisan Healthcare Cybersecurity Act, advancing it out of committee where it now awaits full Senate review. The legislation is designed to enhance cybersecurity in healthcare and public health by establishing a collaboration between HHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
- If you don’t already know that the Sequoia Project is the ONC’s “Rebellious” Coordinating Entity for TEFCA [see what we did there?], then you should skip this part about how it released the new Standard Operating Procedures and Resources — we don’t have time to explain it right now.
- The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) released a report outlining the ten aspects of health AI that are crucial to successful industry-wide adoption. Like all colleges, it reiterated the obvious to already-smart people: the industry should focus on patient safety, administrative efficiency, cybersecurity, and regulatory oversight – among other things.
“No time to discuss this as a committee!” That’s what Han Solo yells at the bossy (but fabulous) Princess Leia when they are arguing about how to escape the Empire and accidently land the Millennium Falcon on a space slug. [For the kids reading this, space slugs are like sand worms in The Dune movies.] It is important to realize that Han Solo was not really part of the Rebellion, because the Rebellion and the Empire were both chock full of committees. [It’s true: The Galactic Senate had over 40 Senate committees.] The FDA is clearly made up of Star Wars fans because the agency just launched its Digital Health Advisory Committee. Unlike Han Solo, the FDA has time to ask a committee’s help to oversee the regulation of tricky issues like AI and machine learning, virtual reality, digital therapeutics, wearables, remote patient monitoring, patient-generated health data, interoperability, personalized medicine/genetics, the use of digital health technologies in clinical trials for medical products, and cybersecurity. Their first big meeting will be on November 20-21, 2024, and this is a roster of who is smart enough to be there. Luckily, Han Solo was (probably) not talking about an FDA advisory committee when our heroes are stuck in a trash compactor and he says “I got a bad feeling about this.”
