“I imagine that right now, you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Tumbling down the rabbit hole?” Morpheus says that to Neo in the 1999 science fiction action film The Matrix. The film illustrates, in rather chilling, realistic detail, how intelligent machines created a simulated reality to distract humans from the fact that they were trapped in an imaginary world known as “The Matrix” while their bodies were used as an energy source. After President-elect Donald Trump named his choices for Attorney General and HHS Secretary, I wondered if we are trapped in The Matrix. If so, at least we can eventually learn how to dodge bullets. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, we will look at one bullet we really need to dodge in health policy that doesn’t seem to be on the next administration’s priority list.
Our health policy future could look very different if some of these news items become our reality:
- The Dunleavy Foundation gave Harvard Medical School $6 million to support clinical AI initiatives for students and researchers, with one of the fund’s primary goals being to expand the AI in Medicine Ph.D. track.
- Congress may pass a bill focused on price transparency (i.e., Lower Costs, More Transparency Act) in the remaining weeks of this year, according to a blog post from Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.
- Congress is expected to extend telehealth flexibilities past the December 31, 2024, deadline, which is what the American Telehealth Association and the Alliance for Connected Care have been urging it to do for a long time.
“I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” Yes, that’s another Morpheus quote from The Matrix. But that’s also what the GAO basically said to HHS and other entities this week when it published recommendations about how to guard against cybersecurity attacks in the healthcare sector. The GAO invokes the devastating impact of the Change Healthcare cyberattack and the increased attacks on the public health infrastructure to impress upon HHS the urgency of doing a better job helping healthcare organizations deal when they fall victim to a cyberattack. Health Catalyst seems to be interested in helping – it acquired cybersecurity firm Intraprise Health this week for $43M. But it is the subagency of HHS in charge of pandemics and public health emergencies, ASPR – the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response – that needs to step it up. What if a Matrix-like intelligent machine started spreading lies about how Ivermectin, a drug for livestock that is poisonous to humans, was the cure for a global virus? Because this is so possible, we need to guard against these attacks by engaging our own intelligence. As Morpheus tells Neo in the movie, The body cannot live without the mind.
