The Beastwood Files: Spring 2025

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I’ve had an interesting few months. I finally bit the bullet, upgrading my website and selecting a hosting provider. The former was a good idea, and long overdue, as it let me set up a store where I could get rich selling digital content. The latter turned out not to be such a good idea since 1) it somehow managed to create a second WordPress log-in for me and 2) said log-in was linked to me staging site, not my actual website.

This meant the blog posts I created on what I thought was my existing website were in fact on the new version, which is also were I happened to create the product page for my eBook (which I also happened to edit and design over the course of the spring).

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get the new blog posts – namely, the April and May roundups you’ve come to know and love, or at the very least tolerate – to appear on the page that listed all the blog posts. That seemed like kind of a big deal. There were also some quirky tweaks to my new (or maybe existing?) website that weren’t the best, and it wasn’t clear whether they were the result of the site migration or user error.

As a result, I scrapped the hosting plan and stuck with a Business version of my old WordPress site. I didn’t lose any necessary functionality, and I didn’t end up spending more. What I’d been paying for the hosting service basically now pays for a business email address, with the added bonus that it’s not Webmail, which as far as I can tell no one actually likes.

The issue – and this is where it gets interesting, folks – is that I decided to do this a few days after I launched my eBook, which meant to link to it was dead. It also meant the April and May roundups disappeared, along with my heartfelt look back at five years of full-time freelancing. I was able to repost the eBook product page (which was easy enough to rewrite) and the career retrospective (which I’d drafted in Word), and I managed to rewrite the blog post introducing the eBook to the world.

That said, I didn’t bother redoing the roundups. To be blunt, I didn’t feel like it. Plus, the list of Stuff I Read was a bit short, and my Adventures in Fatherhood were a bit repetitive, redundant, and repetitive.

So, instead, I present to you, my loving audience, a quarterly roundup. This includes links to everything published in the last three months, along with some fun tales of raising a child that I may or may not have shared with you already.

Stuff I Wrote

Dang, this list looks a lot more impressive when it covers three months instead of one, doesn’t it?

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • Over Memorial Day weekend, I ran a marathon in Burlington, Vermont. The course was two Figure-8 loops. All told, I went through downtown Burlington four times. This meant I ran up the hill on Main Street four times. My wife told my son this was a mean thing to make the runners do. She wasn’t wrong – and for the next two weeks, my son, who has entered the phase of asking so, so many questions – humored me a few times a day by asking, “Why did the marathon do a mean thing to the runners?”
  • Meanwhile, over Fourth of July weekend in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, my son was introduced to the idea that Daddy attracts mosquitos almost immediately upon going outside. (Don’t ask me why. They always have.) He then proceeded to humor us by repeatedly saying, “The bugs love Daddy.”
  • We’ve recently discovered store-bought frozen water- and fruit-based confections. This is lovely – but, as my son prefers to eat approximately three bites of things before declaring, “All done,” it also means at any given time there are at least two unfinished treats in the freezer. That also means there are often at least two child-sized bowls or plates in the freezer, which is a challenge when, say, we arbitrarily decide the Cheerios need their own bowl.

With any luck, I’ll get back to monthly posts starting in August, just in time for everyone to stop caring about work until Labor Day.

The Future of Telehealth: eBook Is LIVE

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My first eBook – Telehealth’s Next Chapter: A Tale of Volume and Value – is officially live and available for download.

The eBook is a couple years in the making. Back in 2023, telehealth utilization was two years into a plateau following a mid-pandemic peak. In a lengthy blog post, I speculated on what that meant for telehealth’s future, and whether there was anything the healthcare industry could do to shape that fate. The post got a lot of positive feedback, including several recommendations for what I could add to augment my thesis and turn the post into an eBook.

If you’ve known me for even a short time, you know I like challenges. You also know I tend to overextend myself juuuuust a little bit – which is why, amid building a freelance business, raising a child, running marathons, hiking up mountains, and doing my best to clean the house, the eBook has finally arrived.

From a blog post to an eBook

So, what separates Telehealth’s Next Chapter: A Tale of Volume and Value from the blog post that preceded it?

  • There’s some historical perspective. This demonstrates that telehealth has pretty much always been about episodic care and explains why utilization has been on a plateau for four years running.
  • There’s a brief unpacking of the struggles of digital health companies not named Hinge Health, Omada Health, and (at the time I was writing at least) Hims & Hers. This offers perspective about why the road ahead for telehealth is a bit bumpy.
  • There’s a Debbie Downer take that the best time to act has passed us by. I think it’s because the industry’s bevy of stakeholders weren’t sufficiently motivated to act to remove barriers to adoption in the summer of 2021.
  • There’s an offer of a path forward – telehealth utilization that supplements value-based, purposeful in-person care in a wide range of scenarios – and a set of suggestions for how the many stakeholders involved will need to collaborate.
  • There are some lovely graphics, which I designed myself, and some of the best stock art that a free Canva account can buy.

Incredibly, over the course of 42 pages, there’s only one reference to running, and it’s in my bio. If I’m being honest, this very well might be the eBook’s greatest achievement.

Free for a little while longer

Initially, I planned to make the eBook available as a free download over Father’s Day weekend, complete with a great dad joke about it being my gift to you, and then charge folks for it. I even came up with a price of 73 cents per page, as a nod to Regina Holliday.

The idea, as I stated in a LinkedIn post I’ve since deleted as well as a blog post that has since disappeared for reasons I’ll explain, was to see if creating and publishing my own content would be a worthwhile extension of my freelance business.

Then, a few things happened in rapid succession.

  • I stopped using my web hosting service, which I’d decided wasn’t really meeting my needs. In doing so, I wiped out the version of my website that included the product page for the eBook and the blog post announcing it to the world. Oops.
  • As I transitioned back to WordPress, my website was down for a few days. At this point, I offered to send the eBook to anyone who asked me for it, as I had no way to collect anyone’s hard-earned money.
  • Sometime between finishing our Monday morning viewing of Daniel Tiger and attempting to start the work week, the wires that bring the Internet into our house got clipped. Even if I wanted to update my website, I couldn’t. (Unless I wanted to roll the dice with the open Wi-Fi at the public library, which I didn’t.)
  • I came to realize I never really gave a lot of thought – any, really – to how I planned to promote the eBook once I’d launched it.

Given all that, I’ve decided to make the eBook free for a bit longer, either as a download on this here website or by asking my nicely on LinkedIn or via email. The $30.66 cost will go into effect on July 8, after we’ve all recovered from the long weekend. 

The first of more to come

My rationale for charging for the eBook is partly to try to cover expenses (I paid my reviewers, got professional headshots, and upgraded my website) and partly to see if there’s true demand for this type of thing. It’s not the end of the world if I take a loss. For good or ill, in the back of my head this was as much of a passion project as it was a business venture, along with a fairly low-stress way to revive my rudimentary graphic design skills. Plus, it’s already had more views than my graduate thesis, which took a lot longer to write and cost a lot more to boot.

That said, it’s hard for me not to scratch the itch for longform writing. One of my Internet-less tasks this week was starting the outline for the next eBook I hope to write, which I’d previously scrawled on a few Post-It notes in my planner. The topic: Why the philosophy of patient engagement has made great strides in the last decade even if the market for patient engagement technology kinda sorta floundered. It probably won’t be 42 pages, but it also probably (hopefully?) won’t take me more than two years to write.

As long as my schedule allows for it, I intend to create more content of interest to the digital health community.

Holy Cow, I’ve Been At This For Five Years

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Roughly five years ago, I joined the ranks of millions of Americans who lost their jobs at the height of the pandemic. I wasn’t shocked by any means, as I worked for an in-person event company and focused on the healthcare industry. In fact, after my managers delivered the news to the entire editorial team, they called me for the first of the one-on-one chats with the recently departed because they expected, correctly, that I would take the news well.

I don’t remember the exact date, but I do know it was a Thursday morning with weather similar to this one. For the rest of the week, I spent some time relaxing and some time fiddling with the WordPress site I’d launched in 2017 and then quickly forgotten about.

I also spent some time thinking about what to do next. Getting laid off was the latest in a series of turns in my career. In both 2012 and 2014, I left one tech publishing company for another. In 2015, I took a job as a research analyst. In 2018, I moved to an agency. In 2019, I went into the event business. It’s fair to say I was having trouble figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Amid my various moves, I’d started freelancing a few hours a week in 2015. One friend recommended me for some work reviewing running watches; another thought I’d be a good fit to write about executive leadership and enterprise IT. Over time, I took on a couple more clients in higher ed and healthcare tech, and I set up the aforementioned website to highlight my work. Soon, though, the work eventually became juuuust a bit too much to handle.

I missed it. I frequently chatted with full-time freelancers who were not only making a living as writers but thriving, thanks to their business acumen and time-management skills. In the back of my head, a future version of myself had that role. I can’t remember if it was something I daydreamed about on my commute or during my runs, but I definitely thought about it.

That said, I couldn’t see myself leaving a full-time job with benefits. Fear of the unknown proved more powerful than building a professional life as a full-time freelancer with a lot more writing and far fewer meetings. Put another way, the perceived risks of going out on my own outweighed the benefits of being my own boss, as numerous as they may have been.

Then, well, it was April 2020, and pretty much nothing was stable – jobs, health, the future, one’s supply of peanut butter, etc. I sat down with my wife for a chat. The main takeaway: “Go do this thing. It’s now or never.”

So, on Monday morning, after filing for unemployment – a key safety net as I got started – I sat down in front of the personal laptop I hadn’t opened in close to two years. I reached out to my former freelance clients. I got in touch with past colleagues from my (many) previous full-time jobs. I researched publications, consultancies, and brands with content that aligned with my past work and crafted some cold emails to send along. After that, I probably went for a run on a secluded path.

As those early hours turned to days and weeks, I’m forever grateful to everyone willing to give me work in the early days of my shift to working for myself.

I’m honestly shocked sometimes to look back and see where I am now. I’ve found my footing, achieved stability, and learned where I want to focus my efforts. I have an LLC, my own domain name and, once I get around to it, a business email address. I never imagined I’d be in a place where I’d feel comfortable bringing an eBook into the world, and yet here we are. (You didn’t think I’d get this far without mentioning my eBook, did you?)

I’ve also made some mistakes along the way, and I’d be remiss in talking about my success without acknowledging these failures. For example, I discovered that content for life science isn’t my forte, short turnaround times are difficult for me to accommodate, and certain nuances of enterprise technology are beyond my expertise.

I need to recognize that I didn’t start from scratch, too. I was privileged to have a robust network, a nest egg, experience as a 1099 contractor, a business checking account, an excellent mortgage rate, employer-sponsored health insurance, and clips when I started sending those emails asking for work in April 2020. Heck, I even had that dormant website. Yes, I had skills and expertise, but even that was mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right time and managing to take advantage of my good fortune. After all, I never would have gotten into healthcare if the CIO group at TechTarget wasn’t in need of an editor for its new healthcare site and I wasn’t in need of a new role as the Vertical Software Media Group was shutting down and just so happened to have recently dabbled in writing about EMRs and practice management software.

That’s why this post is primarily a Thank You to so many folks for helping me along the way. I may have done the work, but *you* have trusted me to do that work and been willing to vouch for me when others are looking for someone who can do that work. While I’d like to think it’s improbable that I’d be wandering aimlessly in the wilderness without all of you, I do know I’d be nowhere near my current level of success.

Here’s to five years of freelancing down and many more to go. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go for a run on a secluded path. After all, no matter where things stand in my professional life, some things will never change.

The Beastwood Files: March 2025

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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

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.

The Beastwood Files: February(ish) 2025

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We’re going to pretend I’m posting this one-third of the way into March because last month’s post was also late and not, you know, because I got sidetracked. The fun snowball effect of needing to make up for lost time earlier in February, coupled with finally moving forward with helping my 80-year-old mother get into independent living, left me with little free time. I finally have a moment – and I’m devoting it to you, dear reader. You’d better be happy. (I kid. Mostly.)

Stuff I Wrote

  • MIT Sloan Ideas Made to Matter: A framework on the four paths to success for entrepreneurs
  • Custom content for clients in digital health, health data analysis, technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, and more
  • The finishing touches on the first draft of that Telehealth eBook I keep talking about but am sitting on until we figure out whether flexibilities get extended beyond the end of March
  • …and, coming soon, content from a new freelance client! (Not a new client per se, as I worked there for several years when I had a lot less gray hair. A handful of you may know what I’m talking about. Please don’t spoil the surprise for everyone else.)

Stuff I Read

  • Press Ganey published some survey results about consumer experiences in healthcare. Not a knock on the report or its findings, but it’s sad haha that half of patients are willing to wait three weeks to see their PCP and three months to see a specialist.
  • For one of my clients, Healthcare IT Today, I spent some time poring over press releases from ViVE and HIMSS. (Did you see my LinkedIn diatribe on why having those two events in a three-week span is a terrible, terrible idea? If not, you should read it, if for no other reason than to be acquainted with the phrase “bananapants.”) I found it odd that, for all the momentum ViVE purportedly has, the most interesting press releases all came from HIMSS. Curious if folks waited two weeks as a strategic move or simply to buy themselves a bit more time to get stuff approved. Who’s to say?

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • We have recently discovered the Museum of Science and Boston Children’s Museum. I’ve lost track of the number of hours we’ve spent there, the dollars spent on parking, or the steps taken chasing my curious, independent, and speedy son from one exhibit to another. Boy, has it been fun, though.
  • I have a habit of injecting song lyrics into the books I read to my son, if for no other reason than to amuse myself and my wife. (Especially if it’s something we’re reading for the 123rd time.) I have to be careful, though. In the last couple weeks, my son has 1) randomly belted out “Take these broken wings and learn to fly again!” and 2) said to one of his toys, “Move! Get out the way!”
  • I was having a conversation with one of my son’s friends at school at pickup one day. I made a bad joke, and my son immediately yelled, “That’s a Dad Joke!” His friend was confused, so I explained the concept and then asked if her dad told Dad Jokes. Evidently, he did not. I was flummoxed.

Have a happy March. May your bracket not get busted, if you’re into that sort of thing. I watch for the upsets, which can be a bit, well, upsetting for my wife, who attended that bucolic private university in the ACC that no one likes. (Wait, I have to mention that it’s not the one founded by the railroad magnate. I mean, I *suppose* Stanford is on the Atlantic Coast if you have a boat with a lot of fuel. Ah, big-time college athletics!)

The Beastwood Files: January(ish) 2025

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Well, the New Year kicked off without much of a hitch, and then some sort of lovely crud hit our household at the end of January. Luckily, none of us were sick for more than a couple days – apparently vaccines work??!? – though it was enough to throw off the ol’ schedule I made up for myself to publish these posts and keep the masses happy. So it goes.

Things I Wrote

Updates on Goals

  • Still working on the eBook, though the first draft is finished now. Haven’t gotten started on the new website. Did book a sitting for new headshots. Now need to get a haircut – and the cash to pay for it.
  • Running was going quite well until first my son and then I came down with whatever cold/flu we had. Hot sauce consumption has sadly levelled of, though I imagine it might help with the congestion. Or hurt. On second thought…

Stuff I Read

  • When I wasn’t getting equal parts frustrated and sad about the state of our country, I came across a not-terribly-scientific “study” suggesting Boston is the best U.S. city for introverts. This is based on our proliferation of libraries, coffee shops, and hybrid jobs. Add to that my favorite hobbies (running and hiking) and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more closely aligned to a stereotype or a place.

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • Lately, my son has gotten into just randomly saying “potty,” as one does. My response is to pretend he said “party,” loudly ask “IS IT PARTY TIME?” and then dance like the awkward middle-aged white man that I am. He does not like that.
  • Also, he would like you to know I am a Bad Dad. Why? On three (3) successive evenings, I got the temperature of the bath water wrong. On the upside, we now have a new favorite funny word: Lukewarm. “It’s when your friend Luke isn’t hot.”
  • We have discovered the Museum of Science in Boston – specifically, the room with the rotating exhibit. For the holidays, there was a model train, which of course we went to see more than once. Our aim in going back? “I want to see what’s where the trains were.” It helps that the cafeteria sells ice cream and croissants and has a view of the Red Line.

Happy February, everyone. In between your sneezes, keep fighting.

The Beastwood Files: December 2024

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I’m embracing a bit of a different format this month, partly to keep y’all on your toes as January begins and partly to hold myself accountable for the things I hope to accomplish in 2025.

Professional Goals for the Year Ahead

Make this a Big Boy Website. I created this site several years ago but did about 86% of the work on it in the first week of April 2020, when I decided to use being laid off as an excuse to try full-time freelancing. It’s due for a refresh and, more importantly, I think I’m ready for a Big Boy Corporate Email Address, too.

Finish the eBook that’s been 18 months in the making. Remember that blog post I wrote about telehealth’s day of reckoning back in April 2023? A few of you said it was good enough, with some additions and updates, to be an eBook. Well, I’m taking y’all up on that. Let’s see what happens.

Stick to what I do best. It’s not all sunshine and roses up here. I had a few projects go sideways in 2024. A few factors were at play in each case, but one thing that unified them all was a focus outside of what I think I do best: Healthcare, healthcare tech, and executive leadership. If I decide to take on more work, I’m going to be very particular about it.

Personal Goals for the Year Ahead

Be more systematic about running. After taking about two months off to recover from Morton’s neuroma in my right foot, I finished the year strong. I hit my time goals and snagged a couple age group prizes in some lovely little suburban races. More importantly, I found shoes (and insoles) that work and settled into a good rhythm. If all goes well, this might be the first year since 2015 I manage a marathon in the spring AND the fall.

Be as good a person as my kid things I am. I’m at the great stage where my son, at three and a half, wants nothing more than to hang out with me and do what I do. I hope other people will feel the same way. At the same time, I need to make sure that being there for him and with him doesn’t drain me emotionally. I can’t be afraid to take a break here and there.

Eat more hot sauce. My wife gave some really good hot sauce for Christmas. It was delicious. I see no reason not to have more.

Adventures in Fatherhood

You may recall that I taught my son the emblematic Boston phrase “bang a U-ey.” Now, whenever we see a sign prohibiting U-turns, he screams “DON’T BANG A U-EY!” He’s quite proud of himself, though he hasn’t fully grasped the linguistics of the phrase and believes “bang a” is one word, like the city in Maine.

We recently had the following exchange. “Daddy, I love you!” “Aw, I love you too. That makes me feel special.” “I love the songs you sing.” “I’m glad. Do you even love the silly ones I sing?” “I love the songs you sing on your phone.” (Dear reader, that would be the YouTube videos of children’s songs that we play at 10- to 15-minute intervals a few times a day.)

Happy January, everyone. I’ll return to the regular format next time, since I know everyone’s chomping at the bit to read something with my name at the top.

The Beastwood Files: November 2024

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Bit of a light month up in here. In addition to a few days off for Thanksgiving, we took a few days to go to Cancun for a good friend’s wedding. Along with seeing friends from near and far, and meeting new friends, it was nice to relearn some lessons about electrolytes, sunscreen, and the value of shade in a hot and humid climate. Suffice to say, I was more than happy to land in 50-degree weather upon our return.

Stuff I Wrote

  • A summary of a paper on energy poverty and how the formula for allocating federal aid for energy bills is due to be recalculated – one of the most interesting things I’ve written in a while
  • A quick take on what drive real-time business operations and the value of real-time data in supporting them
  • Custom content for clients in digital health, healthcare administration, technology infrastructure, health plan administration, and more

Things I Read

  • Count me among the many profoundly affected by the Esquire essay on a former journalist experiencing homelessness, his efforts to find a place to live (and survive), and the long, slow erosion of support systems in the United States. The optimist in me hopes this can be a wake-up call for our society’s failure to take care of those in need; the pessimist in me knows that ship sailed a long time ago.
  • In lighter but messier news, Verily and HLTH are planning to analyze wastewater samples from the conference to try to determine if a large conference does indeed spread infections diseases. Having come home from more than one conference with a “head cold” back in the day, I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer to this is “Yes.”
  • During Introvert Alone Time on our trip to Cancun, I went down a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole on Mexican history. I learned Cancun was quite literally a fishing village until the 1970s, at which point the Mexican government decided it would be a great place for beach resorts and funded the construction of several hotels. Not a bad investment. I also learned Mexico was ruled for three years in the 1860s by an Austrian king, Maximilian I, backed by the French. He was a descendent of the Habsburgs, who ruled Spain when they conquered Mexico. As you might imagine, this didn’t end well: There was significant opposition, quelling it only made it worse, and eventually Maximilian I was captured, tried, and executed.

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • A few weeks ago, when my son and I were grocery shopping together, I used a popular regional phrase to describe my need to turn around and get something at the other side of the store. I thus introduced my son to the phrase “bang a U-ey,” which he is now quite fond of saying.
  • We were VERY excited to get a Christmas tree, so much so that we were one of the first ones in line on the first day the local Boys and Girls Club was selling them. We also decorated it within an hour of bringing it home, with the adults in the house justifying the decision by noting the branches might actually settle a bit faster if ornaments were weighing them down.

Last year, a coworker introduced me to the saying, “May you have the holiday season you’re hoping for.” Some people love a hectic household with lots of extended family around a huge table. Some people prefer quiet time with their immediate family. Some people like to curl up and watch A Christmas Story or Love Actually or Die Hard for the 23rd time. (Yep, I went there.) Some folks are keen for outdoor adventures or other trips away from home. Some people like a mix of all four in varying quantities. So I’m going to borrow the saying and wish all of you the holiday season you’re hoping for.

The Beastwood Files: October 2024

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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

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.

The Beastwood Files: September 2024

~ iambeastwood ~ Leave a comment

Happy fall from a divided household, where my wife prefers pumpkin spice and I’m all about apple. (Warm apple cider doughnuts are one of the best things on this planet of ours.) Kiddo also likes apples, mostly because they offer a reason to use the apple peeler/corer/slicer, which coincidentally is also one of the best things on this planet of ours. (Or at least one of the most convenient.)

This was a bit of an odd month. I worked a lot but don’t necessarily have a lot to “show” for it, as much of it was custom.

Things I Wrote

  • Custom content for companies in digital health, health insurance, cybersecurity, enterprise tech, and healthcare payer tech
  • Bylines coming next month! (Kids, this is what we in the industry call a “Teaser.”)

Tabs I Kept Open

  • Matthew Holt wrote a post for The Health Care Blog suggesting 2024 looks like a lot like 2021 for digital health, and not in a good way. Lots of companies are getting funding, sure, but he figures there are only 11 true digital health unicorns at this point – and only one of them is actually profitable. All signs point to a rough road for anyone looking for an exit.
  • If you’re into that sort of thing, Fierce Healthcare published a list of key healthcare conferences for the next few months. I have little interest in business travel these days, but there’s a part of me glad to see events coming back. I’ll probably start to think about it when I see people’s pictures and get FOMO. Right now, I’m not.
  • I grew up watching sports, and I still do, but my interest has waned as I’ve gotten older. I consider myself fortunate that happened at the exact moment sports betting became so ubiquitous. This piece in The Atlantic describing how sports betting hits people’s savings accounts and hurts their families is sad.

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • I do my best not to disappoint my son. That said, he routinely calls me out for scraggly facial hair and deadpans, “Daddy, you need to shave.” In the moment, I tell him, “You’re right, I’ll do it tomorrow.” Then, more often than not, I do not in fact do it tomorrow.
  • As fall began, I noticed my son was the only kid in the preschool class wearing shorts. As a first-time parent, I naturally wondered if this meant I was in some way being neglectful. Then I looked down and realized I, too, was wearing shorts.
  • I cooked the right kind of chicken nuggets last night! Let’s see if we get through the entire bag before we declare once again that we no longer like chicken nuggets. Good times.

Happy October, all. May your children stick to their Halloween costume choices and not change their minds at 4:32 p.m. on the 31st. May you acquire the appropriate amount of candy for your household given the weather, neighborhood trick-or-treating patterns, and innumerable factors you won’t think to consider until 4:32 p.m. on the 31st. May you remember to rake the leaves before the first snowfall of the season – and may that snowfall not come, unannounced, at 4:32 p.m. on the 31st.