Maverick's Update

Now that we have a president who resembles a cardboard box more than a one-man hurricane, we are seeking our current news event drama elsewhere. The last couple of weeks did not disappoint, with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court opinion leak, Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, and the messy Hollywood-in-Fairfax-Virginia-courtroom-brawl featuring Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. In the One Thoughtful Paragraph below, we explore how the digital health sector is having its own dramatic moment but it is going largely unnoticed.

Other digital health news drama that is flying under the radar:

• Using Fitbits and money from NIH, the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics created a first-of-its-kind comprehensive digital health dataset that is representative of all demographic populations in the United States.

• Right after the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation explained how we should change our dysfunctional public health data gathering practices, the online tech magazine Motherboard obtained documents that revealed that the CDC bought phone location data during the pandemic and planned to use it for a variety of purposes.

• Big retail pharmacies, like Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS, are trying to prevent the next opioid-like pandemic by blocking or delaying ADHD prescriptions from clinicians working for telehealth startups, like Cerebral and Done Health, that seem to be writing too many prescriptions for Adderall and other stimulants that are highly addictive. Read more here, here, here.

One Thoughtful Paragraph