What are we gonna do about him? I don’t know dear. We could always strangle him while he’s asleep. This is a quote from the classic 1970’s movie Breaking Away, about a working-class teenager who pretends he is an Italian bike racer when he is really competing in a little bike race in Indiana. In real life, the Tour de France is happening right now. Cyclists peak at the age of ~27. Sadly, Primoz Roglic, a four-time Grand Tour champion, is 34 years old and just dropped out of the Tour de France after crashing twice. We understand how hard it must be for people used to winning to let go. Will Micky Tripathi be able to finish his race to health data interoperability? (Micky’s age – which I don’t know – is a non-factor here). But long, difficult races are the topic today in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
Other news that shows people trying hard, but sometimes it doesn’t work out:
- The Coalition for Health AI is struggling to be the independent evaluator of health AI products. Two of its most important federal agency collaborators resigned from the board and their own members are taking shots at CHAI’s recently-released framework.
- Walmart announced the sale of its MeMD telehealth business to healthcare technology startup Fabric.
- Healthcare organizations, particularly hospitals, are struggling to comply with rules to make the cost of medical services publicly available. CMS published new guidance and templates, which took effect on July 1, 2024, to help hospitals get up to speed. We congratulate David Muhlestein on his launch of Simple Health to assist with this price transparency work.
The film Breaking Away is one of those great stories about how some people aspire to be great even though they were born in Indiana (hello, Hoosiers). The Mom and the Dad of the would-be Tour de France competitor are pretty constantly talking about their wayward kid and his outrageous dreams. The Dad says, “He’s never tired, he’s never miserable.” And the Mom explains “He’s young.” And the Dad retorts: “When I was young I was tired and miserable.” When we were all tired and miserable during the pandemic, it became pretty clear that our public health system was also tired and miserable. Finally, there is a move to do something about it. The HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released a proposed rule on July 10, 2024, to help our public health system shine with new technology. I haven’t read the whole proposed rule yet (give me a break, it is 1,067 pages), but I did read the fact sheet on public health. It says that it is going to update data exchange standards so that providers that get health information (i.e., lab test results, immunization records) that is important to the public must send it to the right place right away. This way, we may be able to do something about – say – a little infectious disease that is overtaking the globe. How helpful! We hope this interoperability race ends the way it did in the movie (worth it to see a really young Dennis Quaid in shorts that he would NEVER wear now).
