You know what freedom is? No fear. Just like Tom f***ing Cruise. No, this is not what Pete Hegseth said after another “arsenal of freedom” speech to promote America’s war with Iran. This is the most family-friendly line I could find from the most Oscar-nominated film One Battle After Another. Actually, the film that received the most Oscar-nominations is called Sinners, but that has even less family-friendly lines. So we’re going to need to switch movies if we’re going to have a publishable One Thoughtful Paragraph about health policy today. I’m working on it.
In the meantime, a few family-friendly news items that show why families might have freedom from doctors soon:
- No medical doctors are required if consumers want an “always-on personal health care partner.” CVS Health collaborated with Google Cloud to launch Health100, its new patient engagement platform that leverages agentic AI to centralize health data and deliver personalized guidance, cost insights, and pharmacist-led care navigation.
- Medical doctors are “in the loop” but not in the room with Sword Health’s two new agentic AI-powered digital health products:
- Dawn, a mental health platform that provides 24/7 personalized support using clinician-trained, proprietary foundation models and real-time notifications through wearables integration.
- Pulse, a cardiometabolic-focused AI solution that provides AI-enabled personalized guidance and lifestyle support with a clinician in the loop by creating three-way chats between members, a matched health specialist, and Sword’s AI care specialist.
- No doctors or nurses need be involved with your blood draws anymore. Vitestro raised $70 million from Labcorp, Mayo Clinic, and Sutter Health to get FDA approval of its new robot “Aletta” that is designed to autonomously perform routine diagnostic blood draws.
“In a sluggish economy, never ever f*** with another man’s livelihood.” Obviously, I tried and failed to find a family-friendly quote for this blog post. I went all the way back to 1983’s Risky Business, a nice, wholesome Tom Cruise film about how he runs a brothel out of his parents’ house to help pay for damages to the family car. It reflects the kind of figure-it-out-yourself capitalistic spirit that Americans are known and loved for, but, regretfully, Americans’ regular dialogue often also comes with F-bombs. The warning in Risky Business is appropriate, though, given how the traditional health care system’s livelihood is giving way to the proliferation of consumer self-help products. For example, Microsoft just launched the consumer-facing Copilot Health to help people interpret symptoms and understand lab results (see a new analysis of over 500,000 health-related user inquiries). ARPA-H just launched Delphi, a well-funded multi-year initiative to make sure Americans have access to affordable biosensor devices that continuously monitor a range of things like inflammation and hormone changes. And re-read the news above from CVS Health and Sword Health about consumer health help. There is no stopping this shift, which is why a team of medical professionals announced plans to develop “The Health Chatbot Users’ Guide.” The guide will hopefully do a little better than the advice Tom Cruise’s “mother” gives in Risky Business: “Just use your best judgment. We trust you.”
