“Hold onto your butts.” I have not been invited to the White House Situation Room, but this may be what someone muttered there given the latest news on the Israeli-Iran conflict. For sure, the “hold onto your butts” line is from the original Jurassic Park (1993), the movie that first featured Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) that revolutionized the film industry. As we all know, there were multiple Jurassic Park movies based on the original dinosaurs-on-the-loose story and the CGI kept getting better. Just like in the movies, health care policymaking keeps repeating itself as the technology exponentially improves. More about this truth in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
Other news about health policy catching up with health information technology:
- The Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, established in September 2024 by California Governor Gavin Newsom, released a 53-page report on frontier AI policy. The report provides a research-based framework for early policymaking and emphasizes pairing innovation with accountability.
- The AMA adopted a new policy calling for clinical AI tools to offer explainable outputs, include safety and efficacy data, and undergo third-party verification. The policy also emphasizes that intellectual property protections must not block patients from understanding AI-influenced decisions.
- The Healthcare Cybersecurity Act, a new bipartisan bill introduced by Reps. Jason Crow (D-CO) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), with a companion Senate bill introduced by Sens. Todd Young (R-IN) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), would require HHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to coordinate efforts to mitigate cyber threats across the U.S.
“You never had control, that’s the illusion!” This is what the frustrated scientist says to the Jurassic Park owner when the dinosaurs at his glorified zoo get loose. In health policy, there is often a similar feeling of control that is just an illusion. We know, because we have seen this movie before. Back in 2013, then-Coordinator of HHS Health Information Technology recognized that matching the right electronic medical record to the right patient was a problem that needed to be fixed. Logically, he asked the private sector for help matching the right Joe Smith to Joe Smith’s records and then released a report. But the health-data-dinosaurs just kept getting out. Despite this, we have no common patient identifier, nor do we have national privacy law – but we do have a lot more ways for the dinosaurs to escape. Flash forward: we have a new Health IT Coordinator who has the lead role in the latest movie about healthcare’s escaping dinosaur problem. Because the new “cages” are an array of patient identification and verification tools, he asked the private sector to make policy recommendations. We are reading through those now (two responses out of many about the digital ID question: here, here). A cautionary tale: in Jurassic Park, it is the computer guy that causes all the problems. Right before all the dinosaurs get out and start eating the humans, the Jurassic Park computer programmer brags: “I am totally unappreciated in my time. You can run this whole park from this room with minimal staff for up to three days. You think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap?”
