Tag: artificial intelligence

The Beastwood Files: January(ish) 2026

A makeshift computer my son made using a box from a Costco delivery.
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The beginning of the year was, um, well, it was something, wasn’t it? I found it hard to be productive at times between the state of our nation, the pile of snow outside, the hole that has opened up in my schedule now that a retainer agreement is up, and the post-nasal drip that comes every winter but is still a heck of a lot better than the flu or COVID. (And this is despite my “assistant” building himself a “computer” to “do work” – complete with a “power source” he has the good sense to “unplug” when he’s all done, likely making the IT help desk veterans in my audience swoon.)

Stuff I Wrote

Things I Did

  • Succeeded in only having one coffee per day – and only occasionally hurting the tum-tum with too much black tea in the afternoon
  • Rediscovered salad kits as a good option for Busy Parents on the Go or Otherwise Unable to Locate Vegetables in the Refrigerator They Aren’t Already Sick of Eating
  • Failed miserably to put out a newsletter – though let’s be honest, 90% of it would have been the AI stories you already read
  • Learn what is a fatberg thanks to a children’s book about urban infrastructure
  • Read a book about Groundhog Day roughly eight times in the span of a week

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • During last month’s snow day – certainly justified, as we got close to two feet of snow – I found myself uttering the phrase, “If you want to interrupt Mommy’s meeting, she said it’s OK, but you need to put pants on.”
  • Also during said snow day, during my third trip outside to shovel, my son decided that we should have one big pile of snow next to our front walkway instead of two smaller piles. As a result, I dutifully spent an hour moving shovels full of snow approximately two feet to make Snow Mountain, which my son ascended and descended many times before it got too dark to keep playing.
  • We have discovered the Winters Olympics. Our favorite events so far are ski jump, ski and snowboard cross (with multiple simultaneous competitors), and biathlon (especially odd because we’ve never bene on skis and have never seen a rifle). We’ve also regaled our son with tales of how hard it was to watch Back In Our Day, when you were beholden to whatever NBC was willing to show you. This further reinforces my son’s proclamation at his self-determined conclusion of soccer (that is, not even halfway through the season): “I like watching sports more than playing sports.”

Happy rest of February. In case you’re wondering, People Who Prefer Summer: Yes, even though it’s very cold, I still prefer this to 85 degrees and humid, because in this weather I can bend over and tie my shoes without breaking into a sweat.

This Month in Digital Health: Some things are actually looking up!

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Welcome to This Month in Digital Health, where I highlight articles and trends that recently caught my eye and attempt to explain why I think they matter. This time around, there’s actually maybe possibly some decent news about chronic care management and care at home, though rural health, AI, and support for the nursing workforce are all a bit messy.

AI is still complicated. HHS is setting a course to broaden AI adoption internally, with the hope of setting an example for the private sector to follow. It seems that healthcare organizations may benefit from any guidance they can get: They’re struggling with AI governance, feel underprepared for AI deployment, aren’t getting AI ROI fast enough, and aren’t yet seeing major productivity gains from AI.

Chronic care is getting good attention. CMS announced the ACCESS model for pay providers for using tech to support chronic disease management. Many see it as a “bold new model” for tech-enabled care, and vendors see it as an opportunity to prove their worth to providers who are typically skeptical of such things. That said, providers have a lot to consider when it comes to who to enroll, what tech to use, and how program structure ay change.

Finding rural health details the hard way. CMS isn’t talking about what states plan to do with Rural Health Transformation money, so KFF Health News filed public records requests and reported on the details. There’s a lot about improving access to food, medication, and lifestyle improvements – just not specifically for Native American tribes, who weren’t eligible to apply and have to rely on their state governments.

More care at home momentum? Former CDC director Susan Monarez penned a piece for Chief Healthcare Executive suggesting up to 90% of care can take place in the home. A JAMA Network Open study found care at home is especially effective in rural areas, which bodes well for programs looking to demonstrate value. Speaking of which, vendors are pushing for value-based contracts from Medicare, which would help with their own long-term stability.

The balancing act for supporting nursing teams. An interview with the Mayo Clinic in HealthTech Magazine (a client of mine, for the record) highlighted the benefits of AI to support nursing workflows – provided that nursing teams get a say from the get-go in what tools will do and how they’ll be implemented. Saving time should be a point of emphasis, as nurses who skip breaks or stay late are probably burning the candle at both ends.

Meanwhile, I found a bunch of odds and ends this month.

Happy Holidays. If you have children home from school for the next couple weeks, remember that no one’s going to judge you if they wear pajamas all day, eat candy for breakfast, and use every pillow and couch cushion in the house to make an obstacle course or fort – especially if you don’t tell anyone about it…

The Beastwood Files: November 2025

A very odd gingerbread house
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Coming to you at that lovely time of year when companies are either already hibernating until January or scrambling to finish things before Santa arrives. Meanwhile, I’m trying to operate somewhere in between – keeping busy yet attempting to shut things down roughly one week before Christmas. In that spirit, I’m writing this while wolfing down a sandwich at my desk

Stuff I Wrote

Stuff I Did

  • Spend a good chunk of the first week of November napping thanks to some viral thing that wasn’t serious enough to warrant taking time off but was nonetheless enough to make it hard to look at the ol’ computer screen for too long
  • Listened to my first holiday song of the season – Christmas Eve / Sarajevo from the Trans Siberian Orchestra, of course
  • Somehow – SOMEHOW – listened to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald for the first time
  • Cooked a 12-pound turkey for seven people, two of whom didn’t eat any (one for dietary reasons, one because he’s a very picky 4-year-old), which left plenty for turkey soup (which is really what I’m here for, let’s be honest)
  • Bought a Christmas tree and immediately decorated it, because said 4-year-old is also not the best at waiting
  • Entered the season of “do the tires *really* need air, or is it just that the temperature dropped?”

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • We continued our annual tradition of making gingerbread houses. I fulfilled my patriarchal duties of taste-testing the candy. My son managed to decorate his house all by himself, coming up with his own ideas and drawing inspiration from Mommy as well as our friend who joined us for the evening. For some reason, my contribution – pictured here – didn’t inspire him. I don’t understand why.
  • After largely ignoring our balance bike for the better part of two years, we randomly decided to try it out again. We got the hang of it but also seemed a bit frustrated as to why we had to ride on quiet paths and not one of the most well-trafficked rail trails in the nation.
  • We’ve started to play a game where, when Daddy leans forward in his seat, we sneak behind him and yell, “Squish me!” I respond to this by saying, “Son, the first thing they told us in all the First-Time Parent classes was that you shouldn’t squish your baby.” I now use this to explain other, not-fun things that I do – e.g., “Another thing they told me in First-Time Parent class is that you have to make sure your kid wears socks.”
  • We have discovered the Magic School Bus. This is great, except that we’re ALL IN like a poker player who just wants to leave the table. We’ve checked close to 20 out of the library – apologies to anyone in Eastern Massachusetts who hasn’t been able to put them on hold – and read them I’d say an average of five times apiece. I’ve gone hoarse more than once.

Happy holidays, everyone! May you get exactly what you wish out of the season. Talk to you in 2026.

This Month in Digital Health: Confirming Things We Already Knew

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Welcome to This Month in Digital Health. Here, I highlight news articles and trends that recently caught my attention and attempt to explain why they matter. The main theme for the last few weeks has been reports and stories confirming things we already knew – which is still important, because it always helps to hammer home the message.

AI is complicated. AI was a big talking point at HLTH, what with the AMA announcing its Center for Digital Health and AI (to develop policy and training resources, among other things) and the Cleveland Clinic CEO saying AI is necessary for solving big problems like access to affordable care. Easier said than done, though, as 49% of orgs are seeing AI innovation delayed, while AI’s many ethical issues resemble a can repeatedly kicked down the road and healthcare’s slow sales cycles leave AI vendors waiting for the check to come in the mail.

Insurers aren’t popular. Forrester found only 54% of consumers view health insurers are trustworthy, and only 53% understand claims decisions. Insurers are trying to curry favor by streamlining prior authorization, though most consumers said they’ll believe it when they see it. It certainly doesn’t help that 60% of consumers blame insurers for medical debt and 70% say healthcare is unaffordable – a problem that will get worse before it gets better.

Everyone wants ROI. Not everyone gets it. Half of digital health purchasers use performance-based contracts; the Peterson Health Technology Institute expects that number to rise as health plans, hospitals, and employers scrutinize contracts to ensure they deliver value. When it comes to virtual care, fewer than 30% of providers earn significant ROI, as Healthcare Dive put it, citing Sage Growth Partners. That might explain why Amwell is mulling the sale of legacy assets that aren’t part of its virtual care platform.

Private equity likes money. Two fairly damning reports from Health Affairs illustrate what private equity’s doing to healthcare. One found hospice facilities owned by PE had higher profits and lower per-patient spending compared to other ownership models, and another found specialists affiliated with PE negotiated higher prices than independent physicians. Mind you, other for-profit entities exist in healthcare, and non-profits don’t always hold up their end of the bargain; it’s still not a good look.

Other things we already knew or saw coming from miles away:

That’s all for now. Tune in next month to see if the trends are more of the same.

This Month in Digital Health: Everything Is Not Awesome

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Welcome to This Month in Digital Health, where I highlight news articles and trends that recently caught my attention and attempt to explain why they matter. The key theme for the month? Everything’s a mess.

Telehealth is in trouble. Medicare’s telehealth flexibilities expired at the end of September. With the federal government shut down and not authoring an extension, vendors and providers face a cliff, with some keeping services available and others opting not to. The hospital at home program faces a similar fate, as it too needs an extension from Congress to stay alive. Basically, care is now less accessible – just in time for flu season!

Rural health needs help. Applications are open for the Rural Health Transformation Fund – and just in time, what with multiple federal rural connectivity programs facing funding cuts. Amid the well documented rough road ahead, some rural providers are forming clinically integrated networks, though their aim is more about survival than about the traditional CIM focus on value-based care. Really, though – I feel like rural providers can and should do whatever it takes.

AI use isn’t equitable. HHS data released before the shutdown found an unsurprising digital divide in predictive AI use, with small, rural, independent, and critical-access providers all lagging. Groups such as the Coalition for Health AI fear safety net providers will only fall further behind unless they’re able to recruit the IT staff required to get AI efforts up and running. This is broadly consistent with pretty much every single type of healthcare IT, and sadly I don’t see it changing any time soon.

Insurance costs are going through the roof. No matter how you’re insured, you’re paying a lot more in 2026. Employers’ healthcare costs are poised to rise 9%, while Affordable Care Act premiums will increase close to 20% – and some will more than double is tax credits expire. The culprits? Drug costs (especially GLP-1s), the cost of care, and the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Luckily, nothing else has seen significant price increases in the last year, right? Right?

Medicare Advantage is in trouble. Most MA insurers are scaling back their plan offerings in 2026, and annual premiums for the general MA population are expected to increase 22%. Many insurers are also trimming supplemental benefits from MA plans, too, as they say it’s getting too expensive to offer coverage. On a related note, non-profit MA plans didn’t fare terribly well in recent Stars ratings announcements. This all makes me wonder if the MA bubble is bursting: Though 54% of eligible beneficiaries are in MA plans, the pace of growth is slowing. (Remember the second derivative from AP Calculus?)

Also of note:

That’s it for now. Leave a comment if I missed something interesting. We’ll see you next month. Hopefully things will be less depressing.

The Beastwood Files: July 2025

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Starting this one off with Stuff I Read because Matthew Holt, a longtime observer of the healthcare technology landscape, encapsulated a lot of feelings I’ve had (but hadn’t put to paper) about last week’s interoperability glad-handing in DC. Signing a pledge to make tech tools talk to each other is admirable; doing so in the direct presence of men who are quite open about their disdain for proven medicine, healthcare’s safety net, medical research, and the needs of others is not – to say nothing of their very public targeting of the communities that all too often make computer engineering and healthcare delivery possible in the United States. For days, I’ve had a line from They Might Be Giants’ “Your Racist Friend” floating through my head: You can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding. Thank you, Matthew, for saying the quiet part out loud.

Stuff I Wrote

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • Our street’s in the process of being repaved, along with a stretch of the main road through town. We’re also getting new sidewalks. What this means: My camera roll is full of videos of construction vehicles hard at work to appease my son’s truck obsession.
  • We recently invested in a foldable wagon. It’s bulkier than a stroller but apparently like 123% more fun. I lay even odds we actually use the stroller again.

Have had a busy few weeks on a big custom project for a client. Hoping to emerge from that soon. Happy August.

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 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: 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: July 2024

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Long time, no type. This is the first of what I’m hoping will be a monthly roundup of recent bylines and other projects, along with healthcare and technology stories that caught my eye.

I’m aiming to do this instead of infrequently updating what I used to call my Clips page but have since rechristened my Clients page. The idea over there is similar – to highlight the types of work I can do – but with some context and without a largely static list of articles from a long time ago.

In this edition, there’s a bit of an explanation for the method to my madness in each section. In the future, I’ll probably leave that out, with the hope that it kinda sorta goes without saying.

Anyway, enjoy. Feel free to subscribe if that’s your sort of thing. Feedback welcome, too – it’s been a while since I’ve done anything remotely resembling a newsletter. (Though it’s worth noting at the moment I have no interest in turning this into an honest-to-goodness newsletter and m0neT1Z1ng it.)

Things I Wrote

(If I listed the name of the publication here, that means it’s a piece with my name on it. If there’s just a short description, that means it’s a ghostwritten piece.)

Tabs I Kept Open

(This is a list of interesting articles, studies, or the like that I kept in an open browser tab for a good portion of the month, either until my browser crashed or I found something to do with it.)

  • A Health Affairs study found telehealth utilization contributing to modest increases in per patient, per year Medicare spending – to the tune of $250, or about three dozen orders of avocado toast (tip not included). That said, telehealth users had better medication adherence and fewer ED visits. We’re never going to know if telehealth saves money, are we?
  • Let me see if I can follow this … The company that used to be Zipnosis, got acquired by Florence, rebranded as Fabric, and acquired GYANT just acquitted MeMD, which Walmart had been holding onto for three years and could only seem to be able to offload on a company that recently closed a Series A funding round. No wonder there’s so little customer loyalty in virtual care (on the B2B or B2C sides).
  • Please tell me I wasn’t the only one to thoroughly appreciate this interview with R.E.M. on the eve of their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Adventures in Fatherhood

(This will be a running tab of fun, random, trying, or otherwise noteworthy moments in my recent life.)

  • My son is saying “Well, actually…” waaaaaaaaay too much for my liking. Either that or I’m raising a little CEO.
  • He’s also referring to the local movie theater as “the popcorn factory,” as we go in often to buy popcorn but not to actually see a movie. It’s kind of endearing.
  • Right now we have several half-finished art projects strewn about the house – since, you know, preschoolers have no attention span – and it makes me feel seen as someone who has started and not completed no less than a dozen novels in my lifetime.

May you have a happy August. Like many, I have some vacation time coming up, so we’ll see if the pledge to do this monthly actually works or not.