“I don’t know what all this trouble is about, but I’m sure it must be your fault.” This may be what President Trump was thinking when he asked the Office of Personnel Management to institute a new policy giving him the power to fire 50,000 career federal employees for political reasons rather than assess their performance on their merits. But it is definitely what C-3PO said to R2-D2 in the first Star Wars movie. The British-accented droid from the 1970s has a starring role in this week’s health IT news, which would be weird, but these are weird times. We explain the latest weird-but-normal news in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
More weird-but-normal news from this week:
- The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to overhaul the electronic medical record system used to maintain information on medical treatment provided for detainees in ICE custody. This week, the agency that is at the center of so much controversy quietly announced plans to procure an electronic health record (EHR) system for an estimated cost of $50-100 million. ICE expects to issue a request to vendors by April 30, 2026, award the contract in Q4 FY 2026, and run the contract through September 2030.
- STAT published a story about how health systems are creating their own ChatGPT-like AI tool to find things in their own patient record systems. The news report says Stanford Health Care and Penn Medicine developed, and are now testing, tools called “ChatEHR” and “Chart Hero” because they are already managing too many AI tools developed by different companies and building in-house is the “only way out of an increasingly complicated hamster wheel of tech solutions.”
- Turns out, remote patient monitoring (RPM) tools really can help improve care and reduce costs. A new study compared 5,872 patients enrolled in a remote patient care program to 11,449 control patients using Medicare claims data and concluded that RPM reduced hospitalizations by 27% for common conditions related to chronic diseases (e.g., diabetes, hypertension) and lowered total cost of care by about $1,300 annually per patient, even in rural and underserved populations.
“It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” Let’s hope most AI models refuse to impersonate a deity, like C-3PO did in Star Wars when the Ewoks mistakenly believed the gold-plated robot was a divine, God-like being. What’s funny is that CMS is deploying an AI tool called C3PO, which is the acronym for the CMS Comprehensive Cybersecurity and Privacy Optimization, a tool used to review privacy agreements. C3PO has a friend named Elmo who helps CMS with Medicare eligibility and enrollment. Not making this up. AI is being deployed quite a bit at HHS these days — 467 AI use cases — according to the newly-minted HHS Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use Case inventory. Admittedly, I haven’t spent a lot of time with this spreadsheet that lists all the ways they’re buying, testing, and deploying AI. It is mostly a snoozefest, listing all the boring data scanning type tasks that only a computer program could handle. But what I noticed, and what the intrepid reporter Brittany Trang noticed first, is that HHS hasn’t asked anyone to do an independent review or asked anyone to identify adverse impacts of any of these AI uses cases (yet). We know that because there are two whole columns on their snoozefest spreadsheet that are blank and about those independent reviews and whether there are adverse impacts. Is that ok? I don’t know, but I would feel more comfortable if an independent reviewer said that there were no problems with AI being a part of HHS operations. It is like what C-3PO says in the movie: “R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!”
If you are planning to go to the ASTP/ONC annual meeting next week, please let us know. We would love to connect.
