Are you ready for a miracle? Leap Year babies born in 1924 only celebrated 25 birthdays – so doesn’t that mean people who have lived 100 years are really 25? Isn’t that really bad news for Oil of Olay products? OK, maybe that was a leap. But sometimes, it is important to believe in miracles. Remember that Steve Martin movie, Leap of Faith, where he played a traveling preacher? First, that gospel choir rocked. Second, it was a heck of a cast – including Debra Winger, Liam Neeson, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Meatloaf. Mostly, the movie was about using technology and an awesome salesman to trick people into believing that faith would bring the rain needed to end a drought, but then it ended up actually happening. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, we explain how we could use a leap of faith to bring needed solutions to the health care system.
The federal government made some moves this week that may take a leap of faith to be successful:
- President Biden issued an Executive Order to protect Americans’ sensitive personal data – including genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, certain kinds of personally identifiable information, and other data – from countries of concern. The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and HHS are all tasked with protecting sensitive data, but no ask was made of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) even though it has been very active in the health data privacy space in the past few years.
- The U.S. Office of Personnel Management issued guidance for agencies on pay flexibility, incentive pay, and leave and workforce flexibility programs for employees working on AI to increase the AI workforce of the Federal Government.
- The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ’s) Effective Health Care Program is seeking public comment until March 22, 2024, on a technical brief called, “Evidence Map on Home and Community-Based Services.” It is a literature review of home and community-based services, focusing on interventions, target populations, outcomes, person-centered approaches, and quality measures.
This week, I went to ViVE 2024 in L.A., where thousands of people gathered to talk about how to use technology to solve various health care system problems. With all due respect to the earnest do-gooders at ViVE, the best part of the trip was watching Oppenheimer on the flight home. I knew that the Manhattan Project was the advent of nuclear war, but I didn’t know the science behind the atomic bomb was such a leap of faith at the time. Matt Damon’s character asks Oppenheimer “What are the chances, when we push that button, we destroy the world?” and Oppenheimer answers “near zero.” As Matt points out, “Zero would be nice” — but they were facing a matter of life and death, so they took the leap of faith. Is this so unlike what we are facing in health care? Does anyone need any more evidence that the American health care system is broken? While we may need the equivalent of a Manhattan Project in health care, that may be a leap too far. At the very least, we need to address the workforce crisis – professional burnout, shortages – and it seems that technology is in a good position to help. We note that today is March 1, 2024, the anniversary of the day that President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps – which was launched to offer trained volunteers to countries that need them and to help Americans better understand other cultures. Maybe let’s train some smart kids to work on health technology because we need that workforce and because we need a better understanding of the problems with the health care system. Are you ready for a miracle? I am.
