“He’s got space dementia.” That is a line from the disaster movie Armageddon, but it could have been expert commentary about either candidate after last night’s presidential debate. I had hoped to focus on the first episode of Season 3 of The Bear, the intense and poignant Hulu series that I’ve been waiting to binge-watch since last summer after getting swept into the weird and amazing world of Chef “Carmy” and his Chicago-based restaurant team. Instead, I am thinking more about disaster movies that have impossible plots and even less feasible solutions. But at least in my favorite disaster movies (Armageddon, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow), there is a plan to get humanity out of its terrible fate. In real life, we can only point to a plan for how to handle generative AI. So that’s what we focus on in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
Other plans in the news this week:
- The FDA is formulating a plan about how to regulate medical software that supports non-device systems like electronic patient records or clinical decision support tools to make sure they do not accidentally put patients in harm’s way. Wisely, the agency is asking for expert help; it published an RFI requesting input about medical software, and comments are due by July 18, 2024.
- HHS has a plan to stop hospitals and physicians who illegally block electronic health information.
- The AHA and MGMA are arguing against the disincentives in the rule, claiming that they threaten the financial viability of hospitals and guarantee negative Medicare adjustments in the MIPS program.
- Just as Change Healthcare revealed its plan to notify customers about which patient data was stolen when its system suffered a cyberattack in February, Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger announced that the Biden administration will issue new regulations in a few weeks to improve the healthcare sector’s cybersecurity.
As we approach the July 4th holiday, we are all too aware that it is a tough sell to be patriotic about our country at the moment. So, we look around for things to be hopeful about – and you can always count on the super-nerds. They never let little things like popularity contests (presidential elections) stop them from planning. Indeed, we appreciated it when the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) released its draft plan to test the quality of healthcare AI this week, along with its list of to-do’s for stakeholders. It is nice to know that someone has a playbook for the development and deployment of AI in healthcare. There were other thoughtful ideas published in Health Affairs this week about how to handle the explosion of health AI tools (e.g., recommendations for using AI/ML for payer decision-making, a proposal for a five-point scale to classify healthcare AI products). So don’t worry, America, we will be ok. We may not have a backup plan right now – and they didn’t have one in Armageddon either — but we can pin our hopes on our real-life super-nerds. You know, probably.
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