“Adapt or die.” Yep. So that’s where we are with politics, Olympics training, and health information policymaking. It’s a great, straightforward quote from the movie Moneyball. Brad Pitt says that “adapt or die” line as he plays real-life Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who famously argued that data and analytics should be used to develop baseball-related metrics to build a less expensive but competitive baseball team. Billy Beane would not be so famous if it weren’t for Michael Lewis’ 2003 nonfiction book and Aaron Sorkin’s movie script that was delivered by an amazing supporting cast of Philip Seymore Hoffman and Jonah Hill. The One Thoughtful Paragraph below is about when there is a recognition of people and ideas who adapt to change rather than slogging along with the status quo.
Some other news this week about how people aren’t going along with the status quo:
- Jeff Shuren, FDA’s head of medical devices, is leaving after 15 years at the agency. Shuren created the digital health center of excellence (run by Troy Tazbaz, former senior vice president at Oracle) to modernize the regulation of AI-enabled medical devices. The Center for Devices and Radiological Health has cleared 882 AI-enabled medical devices to date. Michelle Tarver, deputy director for transformation, will serve as acting director of the FDA’s medical devices unit.
- Nine former U.S. cabinet secretaries (including former HHS Secretaries Shalala, Leavitt, Sebelius, Price, and Azar) wrote an open letter in US News & World Report calling on ARPA-H, CISA, and other federal government agencies to create a cybersecurity infrastructure to protect the health care industry from cyberattacks.
- On July 23, 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration held a hearing to discuss the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that overturned 40 years of deference to federal agencies that implement regulations despite a lack of specific instructions from Congress. The hearing was a first attempt to determine how Congress can meet expectations for more technical and precise legislation and how to invest in the professional expertise necessary to allow Congress to do so.
“There’s no WE in pizza.” That’s what Simone Biles famously said in a 2016 tweet, which was part of her successful rejection of the status quo that allowed our gymnasts to be trained in hyper-strict and cruel ways (e.g., including encouraging young girls to vault on broken ankles.) Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast of all time, is exactly who could and did break through the status quo to promote athletes’ healthy relationships with people, food, and mental health. This week, HHS similarly broke the status quo. It announced that health care technology, cybersecurity, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) strategy need to play a much bigger role in the future. Accordingly, HHS is reorganizing its $2.85 trillion-agency (to include a most unfortunate long acronym ASTP/ONC) to better oversee health information technology and data. The folks at ASTP/ONC should grab some pizza and watch this clip from the movie Moneyball, where the actor that plays John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, explains to Billy Beane why people are attacking him despite his success in changing the status quo: “It’s threatening the way they do things… and every time that happens, whether it’s the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins – they have their hands on the switch – they go batshit crazy.”
