Me want cookie. This is not the best use of the English language, but the message is pretty clear. To help make his message clear in the State of the Union address last night, President Biden — a fan of the Cookie Monster — parroted the Sesame Street character’s recent post about “shrinkflation.” In short, both the Cookie Monster and the President are upset with snack manufacturers for putting smaller cookies or less chips into a bag and selling it for the same price. Naturally, the solution is to pass a law that forbids putting less cookies in a bag. This type of problem and “solution” is very similar to a scenario happening in health information policy. Readers should rest assured that no Muppets were harmed in the process of writing the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
News this week about health information policy that was not featured on Sesame Street:
- The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) announced this week that it will no longer be a loose group of unaffiliated professionals who know something about the use of AI in the healthcare industry and instead will be an official nonprofit, with a new CEO and lots of heavy-hitting board members. If you were a MyMaverick subscriber, you would have already seen our summary of the March 5th launch event.
- Team8, a venture firm funding companies that offer AI, digital health, cyber, and fintech services, raised $500M for its newest fund.
- Epic, Oracle, Meditech, athenahealth, and other health IT vendors committed to the administration’s Enhancing Oncology Model – part of the Cancer Moonshot Initiative – agreeing to incorporate a specific set of cancer data elements in USCDI+.
Large, blue, fuzzy cookie monsters can get away with a lot. It is little wonder, then, that President Biden borrowed the good offices of the Cookie Monster to propose a solution that fails to get to the heart of the not-enough-cookies problem. As anyone knows who has been to the grocery store lately, ingredients are more expensive than ever. But solving the problem of expensive ingredients is hard; it is easier to just prohibit manufacturers from offering less. Not-quite-on-point solutions are being posed in the health information space too. A couple of weeks ago, UnitedHealth Group’s Change Healthcare company, a digital paper-pusher responsible for getting a huge number of hospitals and physicians’ claims paid and enables pharmacies to fill prescriptions every day, got attacked by a ransomware group called BlackCat. Leaving aside the obvious Batman movie reference (we should all agree that the best Catwoman was Michelle Pfeiffer, so we can move on), the response to this cyberattack is, in part, vocal concerns about how much of the healthcare system Change Healthcare apparently controls. This is understandable: one firm estimated that large health systems are losing over $100M per day due to the disruption in service. To be fair, HHS released a statement acknowledging the cybersecurity issue. Still, much has been made of UHG’s 2022 acquisition of Change Healthcare for $13B – the implication that you can’t have one company in charge of this many transactions because it could cause the whole system to collapse. Consequence or cause? The actual problem here is that we do not have adequate defenses to bad actors who live in their mother’s basement and know how to use computer codes to extort money from people. Maybe get Cookie Monster to reach out: the coders are probably watching Sesame Street while they’re hacking away.
