Come on, Steve. We’ve got a diem to carpe! Dr. Tom Keane, the HHS Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy, may have been inspired to blurt this out to his Principal Deputy Steve Posnack after reading the White House AI Action Plan this week. It is also a line from the great but often-forgotten film Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs. The 2009 animated science fiction film about a device that transforms water into food, specifically meatballs, will help us all understand the federal government’s big plan. Maybe grab a napkin before you read the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
Other messy news this week:
- Current and former FDA staff told CNN that its internal AI tool “Elsa” is hallucinating nonexistent studies or misrepresenting research. The technology, which was launched last month, is supposed to help accelerate clinical protocol reviews for drug approvals.
- U.S. Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) sent a letter urging Secretary Kennedy and CMS Administrator Dr. Oz to outline a plan that explains how HHS intends to support rural hospitals’ cybersecurity resilience as they face funding cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill.
- U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Peter Welch (D-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (D-VT) published a report claiming that pharmaceutical companies’ direct-to-consumer telehealth platforms and partnerships are inappropriately influencing prescribing and designed to increase sales.
“It’s called the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator! Or for short: The FLDSMDFR!” This is the device invented in the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and its acronym is just as clever as the ones we use in health technology policy. In the White House’s announcement about how to handle all the artificial intelligence meatball devices, it is pretty clear that the DOC NIST CAISI is going to pilot AI systems using the NSF NAIRR testbed. Even if that’s not exactly right, you would have to be a real meatball to fail to prepare for this futuristic world. As America’s AI Action Plan states: “Many of America’s most critical sectors, such as healthcare, are especially slow to adopt [AI technology] due to a variety of factors, including distrust or lack of understanding of the technology, a complex regulatory landscape, and a lack of clear governance and risk mitigation standards.” While the acronyms are not facilitating understanding, the plan does provide some hope that we may trust this technology because it instructs the FDA to play in regulatory sandboxes with the private sector experts to help test the AI tools. The plan also suggests that this DOC NIST guy host a party for people in healthcare who know how to “measure how much AI increases productivity at realistic tasks in those domains.” In other words, to do something this big, you need helpers – co-pilots, maybe with a sense of humor. Like how in the movie, Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs, one character, Manny, says to our heroine, Sam: “You are going to need a co-pilot.” Sam: “You are a pilot, too? Manny: “Yes, I am also a particle physicist.” Sam: “Really?” Manny: “No, that was a joke. I am also a comedian.”
MyMaverick subscribers can see our summary of the AI Action Plan here.
