The Beastwood Files: October 2024

October was a strange month in the Boston area. We had to rush order a new winter jacket in time for unexpected 40-degree days, and now it’s 80 degrees on Halloween. On the upside, the cold snap helped us convince our son that wearing Crocs with socks every day is less than ideal.

(Picking up on last month’s theme, we’re a divided household on Crocs: My son loves them, my wife likes them, and I abhor them. It’s everything not to like about sandals coupled with everything not to like about shoes. Why would you do that to yourself? Why?)

On to the good stuff.

Stuff I Wrote

• An interesting piece in MIT Sloan Ideas Made to Matter about how markets tend to view first and second entrants.
• Another Ideas Made to Matter piece, this one rounding up thoughts on innovation in the enterprise
• A HealthTech Magazine piece looking at security and corporate resilience features in ChromeOS
• Custom content for clients in digital health, cybersecurity, technology infrastructure, health plan administration, and more

Tabs I Kept Open

• Fierce Healthcare posted a piece looking at the limited gains of the CMS Acute Hospital Care at Home initiative. As I noted on Twitter, this didn’t surprise me in the least. The program’s enrollment parameters are so narrowly written that it’s nearly impossible to scale a program to the point that it achieves any sort of savings. And, as Health Affairs pointed out a couple years ago, it’s also the sort of program that only works at larger hospitals.
• Avoidable ED visits are a dominant theme in all things digital health, care coordination, value-based care, payment reform, consumer choice, etc. As I learned doing some research for a client, though, there’s no consensus on how many ED visits are in fact avoidable. I came across a 2017 paper noting estimates range from less than 5% to roughly 90%. The paper concluded that only 3.3% of ED visits are in fact avoidable, on the grounds that the vast majority do, in fact, require diagnostic or screening services, medications, or medical procedures. What many would call “avoidable” visits are, in fact, necessary for the patient at the time. Old research, yes, but interesting food for thought.
• I did less reading this month because I was writing letters to voters. Go vote, for cryin’ out loud.

Adventures in Fatherhood

• This month, I unlocked a key Suburban Dad Achievement. I ran outside in flip flops and got the garbage can to the curb right as the truck was pulling up in front of the house.
• Some days, your kids play 4D chess to try to get get what they want. Some days, they grab the ice cream scoop out of the drawer at 6:45 a.m. when you’re trying to make breakfast and say, roughly, “THIS IS AN ICE CREAM SCOOP. I WANT ICE CREAM.” We didn’t have ice cream that day, so a couple days later, we got ice cream as part of our regularly scheduled grocery store trip. I will let you guess whether he actually liked the ice cream.

I hope everyone has a good November. May you get seconds of your favorite side dish at Thanksgiving. I’m running my first race since coming back from my self-induced foot injury. Hopefully there are bananas at the end, as that’s really why my son comes to these things in the first place.