The Beastwood Files: March 2025

Look at me, everyone – I’m not posting this a week and a half late this time! Most credit goes to the iced coffee I got myself after grocery shopping this morning and subsequently poured into the iced coffee that I brought with me grocery shopping.

Stuff I Wrote

• MIT Sloan Ideas Made to Matter: How enterprises can create business value through digital sustainability
• MIT Sloan: A roundup of articles on practical AI implementation from MIT Sloan Management Review
• Custom content for clients in digital health, health data analysis, technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, identity management, and more

Stuff I Read

• Lot of content related to telehealth, as I put the finishing touches on v2 of the eBook and left it in the hands of my reviewers. The most interesting stuff: A brief history of the first chatbot in medicine, which was developed in the 1960s (!!), and two posts from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in which veterans said telehealth quite literally saved their lives. The latter offered some perspective and helped me feel like the eBook would hopefully be of value as healthcare tries to figure out how to make telehealth truly work.
• A recent Accenture survey found 83% of C-level executives in healthcare are piloting generative AI – but fewer than 10% are investing in the infrastructure to scale up use. Much like an early 2000s romcom, something’s gotta give. I’m of the belief, echoed by others, that generative AI will be most useful for documentation and revenue cycle automation but not much else, at least for a few years.

Adventures in Sandwich Generation Caregiving

• Bit of a departure from the usual structure y’all have come to know and love, as I spent a good amount of time in March helping my mother move into independent living. The hardest thing wasn’t necessarily getting her to part with things of sentimental value; it was encouraging her to get rid of things she had never really needed in the first place. After one day of packing and throwing things in the trash, for example, I packed 6 rolls of paper towels and an unopened box of baby wipes into my car; so did my brother. There were two slow cookers, more casserole dishes than I could count and – to be fair – a pile of largely unused cookbooks I’d gotten her over the years to help guide her to better eating habits. It’s tough at the very end when things are either going straight into the trash or into a pile for someone else (in our case, fortunately, the moving company) to deal with and inevitably throw into the trash later.
• With the onset of False Spring in the Boston area, we’ve commenced our annual tradition of planting seeds indoors, watching them grow, bringing them outside, feeding the local population of feral bunnies, and then making batch after batch of red sauce with our tomatoes because I’m the only one in the house who will otherwise eat them prepared any other way.
• We are increasingly learning that different grocery stores have different advantages. Stop & Shop has little mini frozen chocolate chip pancakes that can be microwaved in 30 seconds. Trader Joe’s has child-sized baguettes and stickers. Market Basket has sensory overload and too many stories about how Daddy used to work there.

Happy April, everyone. With any luck, I’ll have exciting eBook news to share soon. In the meantime, I’m realizing it’s been five years of full-time freelancing – so stay tuned for some reflections on that.