“I’m in print! I’m somebody now!” This is probably not what HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said after seeing the news reports of his testimony marathon (7 congressional committees in one week!). This is what Steve Martin said when he sees his own name in a printed phone book in the 1979 film The Jerk. For our younger readers, a “phone book” is a physical object full of very thin pieces of paper that one would flip through to find people’s names, addresses and phone numbers. Phone books were updated every year and would land like a brick at doorsteps across America, which is why you are worried about the environment. There is a new version of a health care phone book to discuss in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
Some news about things that were “published” but were not published on pieces of paper:
- The Office of Personnel Management found all the people that have never worked on paper phone books and electronically sent their resumes to multiple federal agencies to fill tech vacancies (about 700 pre-vetted software engineers, data scientists, etc.). We do not know if they were required to read the White House Office of Management and Budget’s 2025 Federal Agency Artificial Intelligence Use Case Inventory, which, if printed, would be about the size of a phone book.
- A new report says that mental health records are no longer kept in manilla folders on paper: More than two-thirds of substance use and mental health treatment facilities use electronic health record systems for patient records, according to an Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) data brief.
- A long time ago, you could fill out a form to keep your name out of a printed phone book. Some Members of Congress remember that, and introduced a bill so you can keep your name from showing up on other people’s computers. On April 22, 2026, the SECURE Data Act was introduced, a comprehensive privacy bill that would allow people to access, correct, or delete their personal data and opt out of targeted adds. It would preempt any state law that relates to its provisions. There is no private right of action. More here, here, here, here.
“The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!” I am just as excited as Steve Martin’s character when he says that in The Jerk, because CMS just dropped its phone book at America’s doorstep. It’s called the National Provider Directory. It is an extensive dataset that contains every Medicare-enrolled provider in the United States. One health IT substack described it as “the most comprehensive public healthcare provider dataset ever assembled” containing “27,204,567 records across six FHIR resource types, compressed to 2.8 gigabytes and freely downloadable by anyone.” Awesome, but is it useful? Um…I dunno. Like the mandatory consumer health care price lists posted by hospitals and health plans, this dataset is not for mere mortals. It is also just the starter set of provider information — each record contains a National Provider Identifier (NPI), name, qualifications, specialties, and Medicare enrollment status, but nothing else that you and I would appreciate knowing – like, are they taking new patients? Are they any good? Are they affiliated with the hospital in my neighborhood? So this is like having a phone book with incomplete phone numbers, but you can see how it will be super useful someday. It is just a lot of information to organize, like when the bank manager tells Steve Martin in The Jerk that he needs two pieces of identification. And Steve Martin says: I have my temporary driver’s license – and – my astronaut application form… I didn’t pass that though, I failed everything but the date of birth.
