“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, even if it is in California.” This may be what a local sheriff said before the California Supreme Court ruled that he had to immediately return 650,000 ballots he seized to investigate election fraud claims. But it is actually a line delivered by Woody Harrelson in one of Michael J. Fox’s more forgettable movies: Doc Hollywood. After watching Michael J. Fox receive the prestigious Bob Hope Humanitarian Award to honor his decades of Parkinson’s research support at the Emmy Awards, I have been trying to feature him in a blog post. But needed a doctor-focused movie hook. So here we are. As always, I will connect the movie to a health policy issue in the One Thoughtful Paragraph.
The following news is about whether doctors will be needed in the future for certain tasks, in Hollywood or anywhere:
- More than half of U.S. consumers requested or would consider requesting a health test, treatment, or prescription based on information from AI tools, according to an EY survey of 1,000 people.
- Atropos Health published a benchmark evaluating LLMs’ ability to answer clinical questions using evidence relevant to patients’ medical history.
- Teal Health raised $22 million in Series A funding led by .406 Ventures to support projected demand growth for its FDA-approved at-home self-collection device for cervical cancer screening.
“Don’t you have some sort of urgent business thousands of miles away from here doctor?” This is the snarky question asked by Woody Harrelson of Michael J. Fox in the movie Doc Hollywood, who finds himself serving primary care needs in the rural south instead of being a plastic surgeon in L.A. First, I love Michael J. Fox. I grew up on Family Ties and Back to the Future movies, which are so great, but I also loved him for his awesome second career as a massive fundraiser for Parkinson’s Disease research. Did you know that it was the Michael J. Fox Foundation that pioneered real-world patient symptom tracking by using smartwatches and sensors as early as 2014? Technology-supported care is now a mainstay, even as we still struggle to develop public policy to support it. As readers know, CMS proposed to rollback the use of contractors for remote patient monitoring several weeks ago. Maverick Health Policy just started to review the comments submitted (see here, here, here, here) by organizations questioning that move. And we also noted that the American Telemedicine Association’s virtual care advocacy group just launched the Cross-State Care Coalition to promote legislation that will make sure doctors’ state licensure requirements aren’t a barrier to doing virtual visits. Why is this still a question?? It seems like our health care system is still living in the dark ages sometimes. It is like when Michael J. Fox, playing a big-city doctor in the movie Doc Hollywood, finds himself in an isolated, small town with decidedly outdated medical approaches, shakes his head saying: “I’m in the Twilight Zone.”
