“Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.“ For the people reading this that do math, maybe skip to the next section. For the rest of us, this is a quote from the late, great Gene Wilder in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Right before he died in 2016 of complications related to Alzheimer’s, he and his wife were listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s Over the Rainbow when he blurted out his final words to her: “I trust you and I love you.” That poignant last moment makes sense coming from him, a unique character and creative genius. What’s funny is that another unique character in health IT, Judy Faulkner, has an office building that looks like Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, the musical-movie that made the Over the Rainbow song so famous. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph, I explain how Judy Faulkner is creating a lot of news in our space this week.
Other unique health IT-related news from this week:
- CMS announced a “Crushing Fraud Chili Cook-Off Competition” to invite tech companies to use AI models to find anomalies and trends in Medicare data that indicate fraud. Initial proposals are due on September 19, 2025, when CMS will choose 10 teams to test their models against actual Medicare data.
- The American Medical Association developed an AI implementation toolkit for healthcare organizations, an eight-step guide that helps establish AI governance frameworks and includes model AI policies.
- The American Academy of Family Physicians partnered with an investment and advisory firm, Rock Health, to draft a white paper extolling the virtues of AI and how it can address the challenges facing primary care.
“If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it. Anything you want to, do it; want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.” While Judy Faulkner, the CEO of Epic, does not go around singing these types of things like Gene Wilder did in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, it is possible she said these very words recently. With the change-healthcare-as-we-know-it announcements coming out of Epic, multiple media outlets are leaning into the quote from Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Memorial, describing Judy Faulkner as “a cross between Willy Wonka and Bill Gates.” Epic announced several AI-related efforts at its annual Users Group Meeting this week, including AI agents for patients (“Emmie”) and clinicians (“Art”), predicting patient health with the Epic Cosmos model, and collaborating with Microsoft to power Epic’s ambient AI documentation tool. If you’re a podcast person, check out the latest Healthcare is Hard episodes. Otherwise, it is not hard to find quick reports discussing the upside and fallout of Epic’s announcements. For sure, the health AI race is on, and it is all happening so fast. I am reminded of the line by little Charlie Bucket, whom Willy Wonka entrusts to take over the Chocolate Factory, when he nervously asks his Grandpa Joe about the Wonka Mobile: Is this going to go fast, Grandpa? And Grandpa Joe responds: It should, Charlie; it’s got more gas in it than a politician.
