“Looks like you’ve been missing a lot of work lately.” “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been missing it, Bob.” That’s dialogue from Office Space, a movie about people who go to work. We took our work to Las Vegas this week with 12,000 of our colleagues. It makes total sense to do a healthcare conference on the Las Vegas strip, where addictions are encouraged and smoking still happens indoors. But even though your hair and clothes smell like smoke by the end of the day, it is nice to have some time outside the regular work environment to connect with industry leaders about how to solve the big problems of our healthcare system. So, what solutions did we come up with? In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, we will tell you.
Private industry is generating solutions… the federal government, not so much:
- There are multiple private sector offerings to guide and evaluate digital health and AI tools in the absence of federal action, including:
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- Avanade, a joint venture created by Microsoft and Accenture, launched SAIGE – the “Smart AI Governance Engine” – which reportedly (there remains no press release about this) will let users register algorithms, track their performance and evaluate bias.
- The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) unveiled a draft model card template for health AI, which – in theory – would help everyone understand a model’s risks and how it works.
- To help verify that digital tools can do what they say they can, the Digital Medicine Society introduced an evaluation process where developers can apply for a DiMe Seal of approval.
- Price transparency policies are making prices more consistent but not lowering overall healthcare costs, according to a new white paper from Turquoise Health.
- On October 21, 2024, HHS agency ARPA-H issued a 13-question Request for Information about “agentic AI” use in healthcare. AI agents are automating tasks like appointment scheduling and capturing clinical notes during patient visits, and ARPA-H wants to know more.
“There was nothing wrong with [my name], until I was about 12 years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.” The tech nerd character named “Michael Bolton” in the Office Space movie says this, and it is also in the Merriam-Webster dictionary under the definition of “ass clown.” On a related note, the CEO of Blue Shield of California and Executive Vice President of Salesforce were featured in a video at HLTH that mirrors a scene in Office Space where the employees violently tear apart a fax machine. There is no mention of either executive in the dictionary, but the video seems to be a reference to the companies’ partnership to fully automate the prior authorization process, long ahead of the federal government requiring it. According to the press release, Blue Shield and Salesforce are attempting to eliminate the use of fax machines and make the process as “easy as paying for something with a credit card.” At HLTH 2024, it is both telling and sad that a cult classic movie about cubicle office life in the 1990s is relevant to the problems we need to solve in the healthcare system 25 years later. One positive thing: neither executive broke out into a Michael Bolton song on the video. We appreciate that very much. But if you are one of those few who miss hearing Michael Bolton songs constantly, you can listen here.
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