The Health Care Blog – Everything you always wanted to know about the Health Care system. But were afraid to ask.

Above the Fold

Calling BS

Mar 27, 2026

By KIM BELLARD

We are living, you’d have to say, in the age of bullshit. Our politicians can’t answer the simplest of questions without spouting word salad answers aimed at running out the clock until the next question. Our corporations spew endless platitudes about their lofty goals in an attempt to distract us from their mendacious profit-seeking. And now we have AI producing endless volumes of words, an unpredictable amount of which aren’t remotely true.

For better or worse (and, trust me, it has often been for worse), I’ve always been one to ask “why,” to probe vagueness — whether it was a teacher, a boss, or a politician. Call me cynical, call me skeptical, call me inquisitive, but I have a low tolerance for bullshit, in its many forms. So I was thrilled to see that a new study suggests that employees who don’t fall for corporate bullshit may be better employees.

The study is from Shane Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher and cognitive psychologist at Cornell University, whose research “focuses primarily on how people evaluate and share knowledge, particularly the ways that misleading information (e.g., bullshit, conspiracy theories, corporate messaging) influence people’s beliefs, attitudes, and decisions.”

One wonders what he was like as a child.

His new research introduces a new tool called the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), which was “designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.”

His paper defines “bullshit” as “a type of semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging,” and distinguishes it from other types of speech (such as jargon) in that “it is both functionally misleading and epistemically irresponsible.”

Ian Shakil, Commure

Mar 26, 2026

Ian Shakil is the Chief Strategy Officer of Commure, the AI platform being used by HCA, Tenet and others. He came to Commure via its acquisition of Ambient AI vendor Augmedix, and there are a lot other other new acquisitions within Commure (Athelas, PatientKeeper, Memora Health, Rx Health etc). We dived in not only about what Commure does but the big question of how does a client like HCA or Tenet decide what Commure does, vs what Meditech does, vs what Google does vs what they do internally. We also (sorta) looked into the various criticisms (basically all from Sergei Polevikov!) of what Commure and its main funder General Catalyst are up to and what is happening at Summa Health the hospital in Ohio that GC bought. He also says the good experience from AI will come to help patients this year, and I’ll be holding him to that!–Matthew Holt

Function Health has a 23andMe problem

Mar 25, 2026

By DEEKSHA HEGDE

I had an itch to draw parallels between the two. The structural facts kept lining up in ways I couldn’t dismiss, and by the end, I stopped trying.

Function’s product is an app: you pay $365 a year, go to a Quest Diagnostics location, get 160+ biomarkers tested twice a year, and receive clinician-written notes interpreting your results. The lab testing is fully outsourced. Function is the layer on top: panel design, member experience, clinician note generation, longitudinal tracking.

Function Health raised $298 million at a $2.5 billion valuation in November 2025. At 25x revenue, the market clearly isn’t buying a lab reseller. It’s buying the data flywheel: longitudinal biomarker histories that compound in clinical value over time, aggregated across hundreds of thousands of members into a dataset that health plans, pharma companies, and AI developers can’t build any other way. A member with four years of data can’t switch to a cheaper competitor without losing the trend. The unit economics work if the interpretation layer scales without proportionally scaling headcount, which is what the Medical Intelligence Lab, their generative AI model launched in November 2025, is built to do. Function is also building toward a B2B enterprise channel, positioning the product as a way to keep employees “healthy, focused, and ready to perform.”

It satisfies a burning need for specific personas: the worried well, the health optimizers, the people who saw their loved ones get diagnosed a little too late, the people who aren’t waiting for a diagnosis before they start paying attention. These are people the rest of the industry has mostly left alone. I wrote earlier this year, in a piece on Hinge Health, about the prevention paradox: the employer ROI model is structurally blind to the member who benefits most from early intervention. Function skips the employer ROI story entirely, charges the member directly, and doesn’t try to prove a CFO case it can’t make. Yet.

Jason Prestinario, Particle Health

Mar 25, 2026

Jason Prestinario is CEO of Particle Health. The company is best known for its current lawsuit against Epic, but behind that there is a real company delivering a set of products as on ramp for clients wanting to access health data. Particle was cut off from access to Carequality & Epic a couple of years back but is now both delivering services to its customers and separately suing Epic for being an abusive monopoly regarding its payer platform. I had written about this a couple of years ago but I used this chance to catch up with Jason, to see what the sate of play was. He explained that Carequality said that Particle was right in the original dispute, and why they were right and Epic was wrong. The court case continues. But it’s interesting to hear from someone in the middle of the new disputes about data. — Matthew Holt

Assault on Scientific Integrity Is “Fundamentally Problematic.”

Mar 24, 2026

By MIKE MAGEE

This past week, U.S. District Court Judge Judge Brian E. Murphy, dealt Trump and RFK Jr. a severe blow. Not mincing word, he voided HHS vaccine schedule changes and labeled the action an assault on scientific integrity that was “fundamentally problematic.”

In early December, 2025, President Trump directed HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy to review the standing childhood immunization schedule. That schedule has historically guided the state school-entry requirements for vaccines as well as mandating no out-of-pocket costs to parents from vaccine insurers.

The order had followed Kennedy’s summary dismissal of all members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices replacing them with a suspect group of vaccine skeptics without any peer review.

Professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association quickly challenged the action in court.

Judge Murphy suspended the appointment of 13 of the 15 new vaccine panel members, and stated that only 6 of the 125 “even under the most generous reading, have any meaningful experience in vaccines.” The swift rebuke followed the evaluation of the new RFK Jr. appointed group’s work output by an independent coalition of scientific researchers which documented 60 misleading or false segments and vaccine claims in their inaugural December meeting.

AAP President Andrew Racine M.D. was quick to applaud the court’s decision, stating ““This decision effectively means that a science-based process for developing immunization recommendations is not to be trifled with and represents a critical step to restoring scientific decision-making to federal vaccine policy that has kept children healthy for years.”

The action couldn’t come soon enough according to state Public Health officials across the country who have been struggling to turn around a Measles epidemic tied to lax vaccination rates.

Mario Danek, QNovia

Mar 24, 2026

Mario Danek is CEO of QNovia, a behavior change platform focusing on smoking cessation product. Essentially the problem with smoking cessation nicotine products is that they don’t deliver the “hit” of a cigarette as quickly as a cigarette or a vape. Mario’s new vape-like product delivers a nicotine replacement therapy (think like Nicorette gum) just as quickly as the form factor it’s replacing. He is hoping that the device/drug/and forthcoming mental health support will be the engine to reduce the current smoking rate from the stubborn level it’s got stuck at. He told me about its likely time to commercialization–Matthew Holt

Beyond Generative AI

Mar 23, 2026

By BENJAMIN EASTON

Healthcare’s administrative burden is not a documentation problem. It is a workflow problem. Healthcare’s next leap depends on agentic systems that can actually do the work

Over the past year, healthcare organizations have widely adopted generative AI for an array of documentation-related activities such as drafting appeal letters, producing patient-friendly summaries, and even assisting with administrative writing. While these tools have improved how information is created, healthcare’s administrative bottlenecks (e.g., prior authorizations, benefit verification, denial management, clinical trial enrollment), are not caused by a lack of text. They are caused by fragmented systems, manual tracking, payer variability, and workflow handoffs that require continuous monitoring and intervention.

If generative AI helps write the email, agentic systems send it, track it, escalate it, reconcile the response, and close the loop.

That distinction is healthcare’s next inflection point.

From Content Generation to Workflow Execution

An agentic system is not just a chatbot layered onto healthcare workflows. It is a coordinated set of AI-driven agents designed to:

Pull structured and unstructured data from EHRs, payer portals, labs, and internal systems
Apply payer-specific policy logic
Validate documentation requirements
Submit transactions through the appropriate channel
Monitor status changes
Trigger follow-up actions
Escalate exceptions to humans
Log every action for audit and compliance

Behind the scenes, these systems rely on rule engines, structured clinical mappings, secure API integrations, and event-driven automation frameworks. They continuously re-evaluate state changes (e.g., a new lab result, a status update from a payer portal, or a missing documentation flag) and dynamically adjust next steps.

This is not robotic process automation replaying keystrokes. It is intelligent orchestration across disconnected systems.

Preeti Bhargava, Arintra

Mar 20, 2026

Preeti Bhargava is CTO of Arintra. She is the living embodiment of my crack that the smartest people in the world spent the 2010s convincing people to click on ads and now spend their time figuring out how to bill payers more for providers doing the same work. Arintra is in the RCM business. It uses AI to read the medical chart and automatically generate claims using fewer human coders, and generating up to a 5% revenue uplift for one customer, Mercy Health. Of course those paying those claims may have noticed, so we had a chat about the emerging AI RCM arms race–Matthew Holt

How Digital Narratives Shape Mental Health Outcomes

Mar 19, 2026

By SUHANA MISHRA

When discussing treatment outcomes, we usually talk about dosage, adherence, and access. Rarely do we speak about algorithms.

Yet as I began working on a scoping review examining misinformation and disinformation in mental health with a team at the Royal College of Psychiatrists led by Dr. Subodh Dave, I realized that some of the most powerful determinants of patient outcomes are not confined to clinics. They live in comment sections, short-form videos, and anonymous threads that shape people’s view on what is the “truth”. In fact, the NY Post says, “over half of top TikTok mental health videos contained misleading information”.

I chose to do this research because I’ve seen how a single online post or video can change the way someone thinks about their own mental health. I’ve witnessed my very own family members be discouraged to follow a treatment plan based on an inaccurate post sent in a WhatsApp group chat. By examining misinformation in collaboration with experts, I hope to identify practical strategies to help clinicians and public health professionals address their hidden determinants of mental health outcomes.

One of the most striking lessons that I’ve learned is that misinformation in psychiatry doesn’t always seem like a conspiracy. It can often seem like comfort. According to an ArXiv study from Cornell University, people adopt misinformation because it satisfies psychological and social needs rather than accuracy goals.

A viral post on a Reddit thread r/antipsychiatry which claimed antidepressants “numb your personality” may be rooted in one person’s difficult experience. A video on tiktok circulating discouraging medication in favor of “natural rewiring” may promise autonomy in a system that feels impersonal. These narratives spread not because they are outrageous conspiracy theories, but because they really resonate with people.

That resonance has consequences.

Oscar-Nominated Film Highlights Shared American, Iranian Health System Concerns

Mar 18, 2026

By MICHAEL MILLENSON

At the recent Academy Awards broadcast, a brief film clip from the Oscar-nominated Iranian film “It Was Just An Accident” showed a man pushing an unconscious, very pregnant woman on a gurney into a hospital emergency room. Without intending to do so, the excerpt pointed to one of the many common concerns shared by Iranians and Americans when dealing with their respective health care systems.

In the Iranian movie, a hospital desk clerk turns away the woman for lack of a payment up front with cash or a credit card. Although that kind of rejection is supposed to be illegal in America, indigent patients can be turned away if the hospital simply tells them their problem isn’t urgent. Even if accepted as self-pay, they might find themselves being billed up to 13 times what the hospital accepts from the government.

Yet it’s not just high costs and unfeeling bureaucrats that worry both Americans and Iranians – although Oscars host Conan O’Brien did joke that in the movie “Hamnet,” Shakespeare’s wife giving birth alone in the woods was “what we call in America ‘affordable health care.’” Iran is an urbanized nation of 93 million people. While the radical hostility to Western values of its clerical rulers is an important contributor to the current war with America, the society as a whole struggles with many of the same health-system problems as other developed countries, including the United States, and often approaches them in a similar way. Still, there are some exceptions unique to the Iranian context.

Consider Iranian researchers articles about diabetics’ experiences at the doctor’s office; ensuring a future supply of nurses; and health insurance utilization and expenditures for a particularly vulnerable population. Though all are topics which might equally appear in a U.S. journal, what sets them apart here is the authorship. At least one co-author of each is affiliated with an institution whose origins would seem as far away from health services research as imaginable. That’s Teheran’s Baqiyattalah University of Medical Sciences, (pictured below) which was founded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

*By غلامرضا باقری – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18235725*

Affiliation aside, Iranian researchers are typically trained much like their U.S. counterparts, and that’s reflected in both their work and the international journals where it’s published.