If this were a beauty pageant, we just lost. No, this is not what the ABC executives said to each other when they agreed with the cast members of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” to cancel the show. It is a line from Ford v. Ferrari, the movie about the crazy car race that has real people racing around a track for 24 hours straight. This is the movie that came to mind while getting into the March Madness groove. In that basketball beauty contest, the beautiful campus that the Wisconsin team comes from lost to the even-more-beautiful campus the High Point team plays on. Another beautiful contest in the health policy space is the focus of the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
In the meantime, other races in this week’s news:
- A new player just entered the race to get health AI rules of the road ready for use: The CDC released its AI strategy, which outlines the agency’s vision for integrating AI in public health efforts and performance metrics for specific goals. The CDC also posted guidelines to help state and local public health officials use agentic research tools.
- In the legal contest about appropriate health data exchange rules between Epic and Health Gorilla, Epic just raced ahead. GuardDog Telehealth, a defendant in Epic’s lawsuit against Health Gorilla, admitted in a legal filing that it fraudulently accessed patient records and shared them with law firms.
- In the race to leverage technology to keep hospital systems afloat, Minnesota-based Allina and California-based Sutter just took the lead. They announced a non-merger merger to create a 39-hospital, $26 billion system spanning California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The announcement said: “The proposed combined system will be uniquely positioned to be a national leader in digital and technological advancements that meaningfully improve patients’ and caregivers’ experiences.”
“We’re lighter, we’re faster, and if that don’t work, we’re nastier.” This is what Matt Damon says in Ford v. Ferrari, as he plays Carroll Shelby, the legendary American race car driver best known for creating the Ford race car that dominated the Le Mans 24-hours-in-a-row car race in the 1960s. In our health care system, there is an “arms race” between health insurers and health care providers who are increasingly using AI tools in an effort to “win” the prior authorization process. Basically, providers want to get paid and payers want to make sure that providers are asking for something they should get paid for. After years of mistrust that created a slow and manual process, payers and providers called a prior authorization truce in 2018 and recommended a way to make the who’s-going-to-pay-for-what-health-care contest fast and automated. At long last, we are about to see that truce operationalized. Payers and providers are gearing up to adopt application programming interfaces (APIs) to comply with a CMS regulation about streamlining prior authorization mandates. According to a Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) survey, payers are winning the race to implementation. This is no beauty contest – there will be work to do after these APIs get put in place. But it is like when Ford finally designed a car to beat the Ferrari in a race, the driver said: She’s a hell of a machine. [pause] Could be faster.
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Next week, on March 24, 2026, at 7PM ET, Julie will be speaking about all things health tech policy at a networking happy hour co-hosted by Maverick Health Policy and Medecision. If interested in joining the conversation, please email paige.kobza@maverickhealthpolicy.com.
You can also register for Maverick’s next quarterly webinar on April 8, 2026, at 2PM ET here.
