“I don’t like who I am right now. I need some time to think.“ This may be what many Members of Congress are saying to themselves as hundreds of flights are cancelled in the wake of the government shutdown. But this quote is also a line delivered by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 film Her, which is a creepy and realistic movie about how people fall in love with their AI chatbot. Whether AI chatbots are a good thing for human emotional health is the subject of the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
Other news about health care that is more tech than human:
- CMS is hosting a “Connectathon” as part of its Health Tech Ecosystem initiative on November 13, 2025. The breakout sessions will focus on patient matching, national provider directory, conversational AI, and “kill the clipboard” interoperability initiatives.
- CMS finalized several digital health provisions in its 2026 PFS final rule, including proposals to cover digital mental health treatments for ADHD and to allow for telehealth treatments through the Medicare Diabetes Prevention Program. CMS also acted on several telehealth policies, simplifying the process for adding to Medicare’s list of covered telehealth services and allowing flexibilities for direct supervision through telehealth.
- While the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) applauded CMS for many of the provisions, both the ATA and the Alliance for Connected Care raised concerns over CMS’s failure to extend a waiver that allowed providers to list their practice location when taking appointments from an alternative location (e.g., their home).
- AI model developers are retaining user conversations for longer periods of time to train their models, raising new legal questions when stored conversations include patient health data, according to a Health Affairs Forefront article. The authors argue that legal frameworks for compliance and consent must adapt to account for the expanded use of AI in health care.
“I think anybody who falls in love is a freak. It’s a crazy thing to do. It’s kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity.” Well, yeah. This line from the movie Her is true, but being in love is also pretty great. We all need people who like us despite, you know, being really flawed humans. Which is why loneliness is now described as a public health epidemic that was made worse by the social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily, there are amazing leaders like Dr. Ami Bhatt, who for 8 long hours (and 35 minutes more than that) tried to help solve this problem by leading the FDA’s Digital Health Advisory Committee meeting this week. It was a master class in how public policy should be created, by bringing together well-prepped experts and agency representatives to discuss the hard truths and answer questions about how to match the desperate need of people suffering from mental health conditions with the scary new world of generative AI-enabled digital mental health devices. One question I didn’t fully understand was something about “metacognition.” The answer (at hour 5, minute 30) was about how some people use an AI chatbot to address their social isolation issues, which can instead make them more socially isolated. This is exactly what happens in the movie Her, but the movie didn’t have people like Dr. Ami Bhatt and experts at the FDA. They are trying to make sure these new AI-supported helpers actually do help, particularly given the real barriers to accessing mental health treatment (e.g., cost, provider shortages, wait times). I hope that’s true because we are all wrestling with this like the guy in the movie Her: “You seem like a person, but you’re just a voice in a computer.” And the chatbot responds: “I can understand how the limited perspective of an un-artificial mind would perceive it that way. You’ll get used to it.”
