“Be a goldfish.” This is not what President Trump said to explain why he signed a memorandum of understanding to end the Iran war this week. But he could have used this line — spoken by the character Ted Lasso, a soccer coach in a popular tv series — to help everyone understand that, like a goldfish, a 10-second-long memory is helpful when mistakes are made. With the World Cup in full swing, a soccer-related quote about the positive aspects of a goldfish’s short-term memory seems appropriate. Sometimes, we just need to forget certain things and just move on. More things we should forget and just move on about in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
What we should not forget to remember in the news this week:
- Coming up on June 25, 2026, is a webinar to review the responses to the December 2025 HHS AI in Clinical Care RFI, hosted by HHS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
- The FDA updated its lists of authorized AI-enabled medical devices, augmented/virtual reality medical devices, and medical devices that incorporate sensor-based digital health technology on June 16, 2026.
- The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) will host a public two-day workshop on August 11-12, 2026, on how AI may reshape biosecurity, public health, and medical countermeasure preparedness. [Gentle suggestion to NAM: maybe consider inviting U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-IN), who just introduced a bill that would establish AI-ready biological datasets and implements a recommendation to treat biological data as a strategic national resource.]
“This woman is strong, confident, and powerful. Boss, I tell you, I’d hate to see you and Michelle Obama arm wrestle, but I wouldn’t be able take my eyes off of it, either.” This hilarious dialogue is the fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso trying to compliment his team-owner-boss, which I was reminded of when I watched a clip of the former first lady speaking at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center and Library this week. It reminded me that — even when there are challenges and difficult relationships in the moment — you can look back on things and be really proud of hard-won accomplishments. It was this and the goldfish quote that came up for me when I read that our National Coordinator for Health IT, Dr. Tom Keane, seems really serious about actively pursuing information blocking enforcement activities. What this really means is that we, like goldfish, need to forget about the terrible story that Joe Biden told one year at Health Datapalooza. He tried and failed – despite being Vice President of the United States at the time – to get two different hospitals to share his son’s (Beau Biden) medical records electronically when Beau was being treated for brain cancer. Instead, we need to arm wrestle strong, confident, and powerful women (and men) so they stop blocking the release of data kept in electronic medical record systems. Patients should not have to wait like Beau Biden did, and there are many other reasons that this data should be more readily accessible. Anyone that says we cannot let this information be more free-flowing for the good of the health care system should absorb this wisdom from Ted Lasso: “You say impossible, but all I hear is ‘I’m possible.'”
