There is a generation that will always see the actor Ted Danson as the bartender in Cheers, but many generations now see him as the architect of “the Good Place” — a heaven-like afterlife location with an artificial intelligence guide named Janet. This award-winning sitcom (watch reruns here or on Netflix) follows the story of four humans who are trying to avoid “the Bad Place” by repeatedly improving upon their moral character through a series of innovations led by Ted Danson but whether they accomplished the goal is ultimately decided by a court (the judge is former SNL cast member Maya Rudolph, obviously). With all of the attempts to get the good and important data out of health information systems, America seems to be in the beginning of its own Good Place sitcom series. It is unclear who will emerge as the architect-Ted Danson character, but we do have smart people like Deven McGraw, chief regulatory officer at the health records startup Ciitizen, who was featured in a thoughtful interview with NPR about the pros and cons of non-healthcare technology companies mining health care records. With the overwhelming number of humans in our real-life sitcom trying to mine data so we can transform our health care system into the Good Place — we may need more than one architect. There are big plans for big data analytics, like Graphite Health, Truveta, Google’s deal with HCA, and more narrow-scope ideas like Mayo Clinic’s research deal with Pro Medicus subsidiary Visage Imaging and UPMC’s Realyze Intelligence. One of the more eye-popping moves in this space is Datavant’s acquisition of clinical data network Ciox Health in a deal worth $7 billion that will “enable providers to connect patient medical records with other data sources to improve patient outcomes, advance the development of new drugs and treatments and contribute to population health studies.” Right — so — it is unclear how we are going to get to the Good Place from here, but we need to come up with a plan so Maya Rudolph doesn’t send us to the Bad Place.
June 11, 2021 | 4 min read
June 11, 2021
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