I’m off to Finland next month which reminded me of a talk I gave one time I was there in the late 2010s, and I thought you might enjoy it!–Matthew Holt ..read more

By KIM BELLARD When I was young, robots were Robby the Robot (Forbidden Planet, etc.), the unnamed robot in Lost in Space, or The Jetsons’ Rosey the Robot. Gen X and Millennials might think instead of the more malevolent Terminators (which, of course, are actually cyborgs). But Gen Z is likely to think of the running, jumping, back-flipping Atlas from Boston Dynamics, whose videos have entertained millions. Alas, last week Boston Dynamics announced it was discontinuing Atlas. “For almost a decade, Atlas has sparked our imagination, inspired the next generations of roboticists and leapt over t ..read more

Aasim Saeed is the CEO of Amenities. He’s a doc, ex-McKinsey Consultant and spent a lot of time building a version of his tool for Baylor Scott & White. We had a wide ranging conversation about how health systems treat patients (not well), whether health systems know the value of their customers (no!), and how to bump up “in network” utilization. Amenities is a front door tool that essentially replaces those sh*tty MyChart portals, and eventually will lead to creating a loyalty membership experience. He gave me a tour of the new-ish tool that is live at MemorialCare in southern California ..read more

By DOUG MIRSKY & BRIAN GONZALEZ What if digital innovations could be the key to reducing the burden of cancer? CancerX was founded in 2023 as part of the Cancer Moonshot to achieve this goal. By uniting leading minds across industries such as technology, healthcare, science, and government, we are breaking down silos and leveraging digital innovation in the fight against cancer. With ambitious goals to cut the death rate from cancer by at least 50% and to improve the experience of people who are affected by cancer, digital innovation is critical. As a public-private partnership co-hosted ..read more

By MIKE MAGEE In his book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations” (MIT Press/1994), Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, famously wrote, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.” A year earlier, psychologist Karl E. Weich from the University of Michigan penned the term “sensemaking” based on his belief that the human mind was in fact the engine of productivity, and functioned like a biological computer which “receives input, processes the information, and delivers an output.” But comparing the human brain to a computer was not exactly a compl ..read more

Tim O’Connell discusses emtelligent’s capability to take unstructured clinical data and using NLP, match it to clinical ontologies and figure out what disease patients have, and enable payers and providers to do something about it–rather than payment coding which is what NLP has usually been used for. I spoke to him at HIMSS in March where he was launching emtelligent own new large language model (LLM). Anyone with a health data set is a potential client, but Tim thinks we can use all this data and his company’s technology to radically improve our understanding of clinical care, and improve it ..read more

Medicomp provides a medical database within an EMR and which delivers all the diagnoses and other information directly to the clinician. It represents the note to the physician as a SMART on FHIR app so that they can quickly find the information they need within their workflow. I had a quick catch up with CEO Dave Lareau, and asked him not only what Medicomp does but how all that generative AI has started to change this. He thinks that the output of LLMs and ambient AI will actually make a greater demand for their tools–from a company that’s coming up on its 50th birthday! (Well 46th….)–Matthe ..read more

By KMI BELLARD I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure. In particular, what to do when it fails. There was, of course, the tragic collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. Watching the video – and, honestly, what were the odds there’d be video? — is like watching a disaster movie, the bridge crumbling slowly but unstoppably. The bridge had been around for almost fifty years, withstanding over 11 million vehicles crossing it each year. All it took to knock it down was one container ship. Container ships passed under it every day of its existence; the Port of Baltimore is one of t ..read more

By JEFF GOLDSMITH Years ago, the largest living thing in the world was thought to be the blue whale. Then someone discovered that the largest living thing in the world was actually the 106 acre, 47 thousand tree Pando aspen grove in central Utah, which genetic testing revealed to be a single organism. With its enormous network of underground roots and symbiotic relationship with a vast ecosystem of fungi, that aspen grove is a great metaphor for UnitedHealth Group. United, whose revenues amount to more than 8% of the US health system, is the largest healthcare enterprise in the worl ..read more

Bevey Miner runs health care for Consensus Cloud Solutions. I’ve known Bevey since she was at Allscripts in the 2000s where she was one of the first building online prescribing. She’s been at lots of places and is now at Consensus which is taking unstructured data via cloud fax and assessing it, structuring it and delivering it–especially to places like skilled nursing facilities. Bevey calls that data at the “outer circles” and we were talking at a time when a lot of electronic communication was down because of the Change Healthcare hack when a lot of it wasn’t flowing. Bevey tells us about w ..read more