Be Curious, Not Judgmental
Ruminations and musings about healthcare AI, technology, and strategy
Tag: Healthcare-Policy
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LumiHealth: What Building a National Health Game Taught Me About Behavior Change
A toast to the program I built at Apple with Singapore — and a case for why wellness is infrastructure, not a nice-to-have. Tim Cook once said, “If you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, ‘What was Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind?’ It will be about health.” I used to think about that line often when I worked at Apple. And it… Read more
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How AI Gets Paid Is How It Scales
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Almost ten years ago at Apple, we had a vision of how care delivery would evolve: face‑to‑face visits would not disappear, virtual visits would grow, and a new layer of machine-based care would rise underneath. Credit goes to Yoky Matsuoka for sketching this picture. Ten years later, I believe AI will materialize this vision because of its impact on the unit economics of healthcare. Labor is the scarcest input in… Read more
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America’s Patchwork of Laws Could Be AI’s Biggest Barrier in Care
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AI is learning medicine, and early state rules read as if regulators are regulating a risky human, not a new kind of software. That mindset could make sense in the first wave, but it might also freeze progress before we see what these agents can do. When we scaled operations at Carbon Health, the slowest parts were administrative and regulatory–months of licensure, credentialing, and payer enrollment that shifted at each… Read more
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The Gameboard for AI in Healthcare
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Healthcare was built for calculators. GPT-5 sounds like a colleague. Traditional clinical (as I explored in the new computer in the clinic) software is deterministic by design, same input and same output, with logic you can trace and certify. That is how regulators classify and oversee clinical systems, and how payers adjudicate claims. By contrast, the GPT-5 health moment that drew attention was a live health conversation in which the… Read more
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Yippee-Ki-Yay, Paper Clipboard
Checking in for a doctor’s appointment still feels like time‑travel to the 1990s for most patients. You step up to the reception desk, are handed a clipboard stacked with half a dozen forms, then pass over your driver’s license and an insurance card so someone can photocopy them. You balance the board on your knee in an uncomfortable chair, rewriting your address, employer, and allergies—information that already lives somewhere on… Read more
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Level‑5 Healthcare: Why Prescribing Will Decide When AI Becomes a Real Doctor
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Every week seems to bring another paper or podcast trumpeting the rise of diagnostic AI. Google DeepMind’s latest pre‑print on its Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) is a good example: the model aced a blinded OSCE against human clinicians, but its researchers still set restrictive guardrails, forbidding any individualized medical advice and routing every draft plan to an overseeing physician for sign‑off. In other words, even one of the most advanced AI clinical systems… Read more
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DOGE & #MakeAmericaHealthyAgain
Some personal opinions on what DOGE and #MakeAmericaHealthyAgain could do to reshape U.S. healthcare. The HHS budget is ~$1.8 trillion, ~23% of the federal budget as proposed for FY25; CMS makes up the lion’s share of the budget (>80%). Hard to imagine reducing the deficit without major changes in how healthcare is funded and delivered. In this table from the Dec 2022 OMB analysis of options to reduce the deficit,… Read more