“I never knew that we weren’t that great in high school.” This could be what Snoop Dog was telling Cameron Diaz at the Winter Olympics, as he rocked a shirt that had Lindsey Vonn’s life-size face on it. (Cam and Snoop did go to high school together, if you didn’t know.) But this is actually a line from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (a 1997 movie that is streaming on Disney+ but you can watch a clip here). It was the film that I kept thinking about while hiding in the ladies’ room at the ASTP/ONC’s annual meeting this week (if you watch that clip, you will see that there is an iconic scene that takes place in the ladies’ bathroom). The meeting was packed and full of earnest positivity, but it felt very much like a bunch of people who had finally shaken off their high school nerd-ery to be wildly successful professionals who didn’t care what the popular girls in high school thought of them. I explain why the health IT nerds are winning in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
More winners from this week’s news:
- Some people got promoted at HHS (or maybe just have new responsibilities, hard to tell if these are “promotions” in the traditional sense): Director of Medicare Chris Klomp is now also in charge of overseeing all of HHS operations; Deputy Administrator and the Chief Policy and Regulatory Officer at CMS John Brooks will now also be a senior counselor at CMS.
- Caregiver winners will be named by the HHS’ Administration for Community Living (ACL), as it began Phase 1 of its Caregiver AI Prize Competition. The idea is to reward (up to $2.5 million in funding) by developing tech companies and caregivers who develop the coolest AI solutions that reduce the burden of caregiving. Applications are due July 31, 2026, with informational webinars in March and May.
- Microsoft announced three finalists for its Rural Health AI Lab “Referrals Router” competition of AI-enabled low-code/no-code solutions: Bauhealth’s clinical and financial operations platform, Afya Global’s specialty access platform, and Switchboard Health’s care navigation platform. These finalists presented solutions at the American Hospital Association Rural Health Leadership Conference on February 10, 2026.
“Would you excuse me? I cut my foot before and my shoe is filling up with blood.” This is not how I got out of some conversations with people at the ASTP/ONC meeting, but I did think about using this great line from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. Talking about interoperability, transparency, and FHIR APIs is fun and all, but sometimes you just want to escape to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Mostly, I was impressed with the enthusiasm for all the things that we’ve been working on for 20 years. To be fair, it seems like we may actually make some progress soon. Two examples: the national provider directory may be finally having a moment (shout-out to NHD inventor Alexandra Mugge, who made a cameo appearance at the ASTP/ONC meeting like all real celebrities do) and TEFCA (the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement that is the mechanism through which the Feds are trying to encourage more health data access for providers and patients) is an active exchange hub for ~500 million records. Yaaay. I mean, it is good, and I am totally for all this progress. I just want it to finally happen, you know? Instead, it feels like we are all trying to solve a giant word problem from high school. Like they say in the movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion: “Remember Mrs. Divitz’s class, there was like always a word problem. Like, there’s a guy in a rowboat going X miles, and the current is going like, you know, some other miles, and how long does it take him to get to town? It’s like, ‘Who cares? Who wants to go to town with a guy who drives a rowboat?”
