The Beastwood Files: March(ish) 2026

Coming to you on a Wednesday evening halfway through the month because I did the thing freelancers like to do where they take on too many assignments at a time – which, if it wasn’t bad enough, was made worse by the fact that I did this at the same time as 1) tax season and 2) try-to-figure-out-after-school-care-for-your-soon-to-be-kindergartner season. At least no one in the house was sick.

Stuff I Wrote

• MIT Sloan Ideas Made to Matter: Putting AI to work, which summarizes research from MIT Sloan Management Review that explores how to make the most of AI – and where the technology has its limits
• HealthTech Magazine: The Connected Care Continuum: Enhancing Patient Care Across Settings, which examines at a strategic and tactical level the technology necessary to support care beyond the hospital
• Digital Health Insights: 5 takeaways from Rackspace’s assessment of cloud maturity in healthcare, because every month needs at lease one self-explanatory headline
• Digital Health Insights: What the UHS acquisition of Talkspace means for behavioral health and healthcare mergers, because this month gets two self-explanatory headlines apaprently
• Digital Health Insights: As CVS Health works on its engagement platform, others go live, as the retail health giant seems content not to rush a copycat product to market
• Digital Health Insights: Guidance for patient use of AI is in the works, since there’s pent-up demand for LLMs but little understanding of how to use them – or how to interpret their outputs
• Custom content for clients in digital health, life sciences, health insurance operations, EHR systems, and more

Things I Did

• Celebrate Pi Day with some close friends, approximately one pie per person, and a rule that anyone in attendance was required to take home leftovers
• Bake Chocolate Crinkle Cookies, a classic winter holiday staple, on the approximate Spring Equinox
• Leave the shovel and rock salt on the front porch – because we all know the day they go in the basement is the day there’s a thoroughly unexpected snowstorm
• Fail to take advantage of day-after-Easter candy sales (which frankly may have been for the better, as we still have Dark Chocolate Cadbury Mini Eggs, which are the better kind)

Adventures in Fatherhood

• We revisited a past Pi Day tradition and made a Pie Shop from a gigantic Costco-sized box of paper towels, from which we dispensed dessert pies as well as pizza and seltzer (while supplies lasted). Why I neglected to take a picture of that and instead am tempting you with a poorly rotated, out-of-focus picture of cookies is something I’ll never be able to fully explain.
• We made our first trip to the LEGO Discovery Center, and it went about as well as we could have hoped. If not for the next day’s visit from the Easter Bunny, we might even still be playing with the LEGO Delivery Van we got from the gift shop.
• Speaking of the Easter Bunny … along with dutifully leaving some carrots for him to munch on, we pleaded with him to talk to his “friends” about not eating everything in our garden, please. This may come as a shock, but it didn’t work.
• I made the mistake of telling my son that I occasionally spell my name wrong when I sign an email. Now, every once in a while, to crack himself up, he’ll just randomly blurt out, “Thanks, Brain!”

Happy spring. May the bunnies leave your garden alone. In addition, may your preferred baseball team remember how to hit the ball, which my team seems to have forgotten.