“David, the President can’t be a loose cannon.” This may be what Elon Musk said to David Warrington, the White House Counsel, about President Trump as the war between the two men exploded this week. But I wouldn’t know about that. This is a line from the 2011 movie The Adjustment Bureau, where Matt Damon and Emily Blunt discover that the world is run by a bunch of angels in fedoras who work for God. So, kind of the same thing. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, I describe a few things that are happening behind the scenes thanks to angels in health policy.
Some news about industry angels who are trying to be helpful:
- The Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) launched the Connected Health Community Collaborative, an open-source resource initiative designed to help scale hospital-at-home programs.
- Former Amazon employees launched General Medicine, a new digital health marketplace. The platform connects users to telehealth practices, displaying estimated copays for virtual visits and external testing.
- Pyx Health, a patient engagement company targeting loneliness, acquired FarmboxRx, a company that uses fresh food to build relationships and engage patients by using a $47.5M investment from TT Capital Partners.
David: So, you handle the important things? The last time I checked, the world is a pretty screwed-up place. Angel: It’s still here. If we had left things in your hands, it wouldn’t be. Again, probably not a dialogue between the White House Counsel and archangels like Elon Musk. This was an exchange between the U.S. Senate candidate played by Matt Damon, our hero in the movie The Adjustment Bureau. The film tells an interesting story about how the “Adjustment Bureau” (a group of angels) makes sure that people’s lives proceed according to “the Plan” created by “the Chairman.” There are many angels at work in real life health policy efforts, too. They are trying to help humans stick to “the Plan” of using technology to make the healthcare system better. I attended an angel-packed meeting run by the Peterson Health Institute of Technology yesterday, to discuss their latest report on virtual solutions for anxiety and depression. We have a newly-appointed angel this week: the HHS Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy is Dr. Thomas Keane, who will try to make health information flow to where it needs to go. We also noticed that HHS CIO Clark Minor got a helper angel in Kevin Duvall. It will be interesting to see what army of angels can make the newly announced CMS technology-related plans a reality. There is a lot of activity in the health tech space right now, and it’s not slowing down. All of the health tech helper angels are going to need to be at the top of their game and relatively indefatigable. As one angel said to another in The Adjustment Bureau: “You look exhausted. You should take a vacation when all this is finished.” The other angel said something we can all relate to right now: “I’m not sure the kind of tired I am can be fixed by a vacation.”
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