“To infinity and beyond!” This is not what Dr. Oz said at an “Action for Progress” event this week, but it seems to capture how he feels about the fantastic capabilities of AI avatars to help with the dire shortage of mental health clinicians. This is Buzz Lightyear’s famous catch phrase from the first Pixar film, Toy Story, which was produced and developed by the smart people who graduated from Carnegie Mellon. Pixar is what happened when people at Disney realized they needed to modernize the old way of making animated films to reach a new generation. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, I explain who is knocking on Carnegie Mellon’s door now to modernize a critical part of our health care system.
More news about attempts to modernize the health care system:
- The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) launched the AI Agent Standards Initiative to enable the adoption of next-generation AI agents with industry-led standards, open-source protocols, and research on potential use cases.
- The FDA announced it will host a virtual town hall on March 11, 2026, to discuss updates to its guidance on clinical decision support software. STAT News reported Dr. Rick Abramson, the former Chief Medical Officer of Harrison.ai, a company that uses AI to interpret radiological images, will be the new Director for the FDA’s Digital Health Center of Excellence (DHCoE).
- Major health insurers are investing lots of money in AI. Elevance, Cigna, CVS Health, all made announcements about their intent to ramp up their use of AI, with UnitedHealth Group laying out the eye-popping sum of $1.5 billion for AI tools in 2026 alone. Indeed, one of its companies, Optum, just announced a new AI tool, “Value Connect” that will analyze data to help determine when patients need additional help to improve their health outcomes.
“Reach for the sky.” If you pull his string, this is one of the things the old-school cowboy doll Woody will say in the movie Toy Story. While we all appreciate the charming throwback to the olden days that Woody represents, this is actually a threat of gun violence from a child’s toy. Not great. The whole movie is a sad recognition that the old days were swell, but we are all moving on to cooler, bigger things. Which is why Steve Jobs gathered the smart people at Carnegie Mellon to show Disney how to make cooler, smarter movies way back in 1995. Just like our health care system, Disney was bumbling along trying to do things the old way and it was just not working. The American health care system also needs big, fresh thinking. So just like Disney, the people from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) just visited Carnegie Mellon’s Biological and Chemical Innovation Cloud Lab to see how they are using robotics and AI to advance biotech. With only one thoughtful paragraph, I do not have time to go into NSCEB’s important reports that show how America is WAY behind China on biotech research – which means, in part, that Americans will suffer from diseases that could be treated or cured. While we are all focused on little bites at the modernization apple, it is these big, mind-blowing changes that we should (ARPA-H should?) be focused on. We keep congratulating ourselves for holding successful “plastic corrosion awareness meetings” when we should be welcoming modern new toys. For those who need a visual aid, look at this clip where old school Sherriff Woody says to Andy’s collection of older toys in Toy Story: “Tuesday night’s plastic corrosion awareness meeting, was I think, a big success. We’d like to thank Mr. Spell for putting that on for us. Thank you, Mr. Spell.”
