The Beastwood Files: March(ish) 2026

April 16, 2026April 16, 2026 ~ iambeastwood ~ Leave a comment

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.

The Beastwood Files: December 2025

January 5, 2026 ~ iambeastwood ~ Leave a comment

Are you back to work? Do you know what day it is? Does time even exist as a concept? I’m hitting the ground running in January, bearing in mind that most of my running is actually at an easy, conversational pace and followed by a nice snack and maybe some hot tea.

Stuff I Wrote

HealthTech Magazine: Data Clean Rooms Support Healthcare Security and Innovation – How industry stakeholders benefit from secure environments for using and sharing data
Digital Health Insights: Updated CPT codes face scrutiny over fees, politics, and control – Usually, the AMA publishes new CPT codes and everyone moves on, but that wasn’t the case this fall
Digital Health Insights: What PwC’s latest consumer survey says about the future of care delivery – Young Americans place more trust in technology, and that has shifted the way they engage with care providers
Digital Health Insights: Does hospital at home have a light at the end of the tunnel? – A five-year waiver, approved by the U.S. House, would give the program much-needed funding and stability

Things I Did, Christmas Edition

Left a trail of pine needles from the living room down the stairs and to the curb after failing to learn for like the 12th consecutive year that a Christmas tree acquired in late November is effectively dead well before New Year’s
Assembled lots of LEGO ay my son’s behest
Drank tea from a swanky mug with a logo my wife designed (she also made business cards and a T-shirt, which I’ll show off when it’s not so damn cold)
Gave my wife a nice stapler, which prompted her to say, “Go look for the gold gift bag,” which contained … a nice stapler that she’d gotten for me (Kids, getting old is so much fun, isn’t it?)
Signed up, once again, for the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington over Memorial Day weekend

Adventures in Fatherhood

I had a Proud Dad moment when, amid one of approximately 1,234 random conversations over the holiday break, my son described how turning off a toy and then turning it back on is a good way to get it to start working again. Kid, you now know how to solve 75% of IT Help Desk issues!
Amid a few of the approximately 1,234 random conversations, I introduced a topic called Real Talk With Daddy, which is when I address important issues in our lives. One was having sweaty feet. Another was the pros and cons of Diet Coke and coffee as sources of caffeine, especially relative to short-term impact on the digestive tract. A third was the quality of English food. Open to suggestions for further discussion points.
Like many parents, we spent a good chunk of the holiday break answering the question “What are we doing next?” on days we’d made it clear we had no interest in actually leaving the house. In jest, I repeatedly suggested that we alphabetize our socks. On New Year’s Day, my son called my bluff and said it was time to go upstairs and do it. (In case you’re wondering: You organize my color, then put the colors in alphabetical order.) We did NOT do this with Daddy’s socks, as they are either boring black and boring white, with maybe a couple navy blue for good measure.

Happy January. I’ve resolved to drink less coffee, use my downtime more thoughtfully, better focus on cross training, publish two eBooks (one being the patient engagement one I really should’ve finished last year), be more thoughtful about one-off projects, and continue to get rid of stuff I don’t need. Nothing is earth-shattering, but collectively I hope they will make for a better year. Well, that and more tea.

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

December 22, 2025March 13, 2026 ~ iambeastwood ~ Leave a comment

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.

The Leapfrog Group’s latest safety ratings roll up hospitals into their parent organizations. It’s an intriguing look at which facilities are being left behind after M&A activity.
The number of concierge and direct primary care practices increased 83% from 2018 and 2023. That contributes to a shortage of PCPs in traditional settings, which isn’t the best.
Whoopsie! Whoop got a slap on the wrist from the FDA about rolling out blood pressure measurement without authorization. The company argued BP is a wellness feature, not a medical diagnosis. Expect broad philosophical debates to follow.
Providers are pushing back at updates to the HIPAA Security Rule that the Biden administration proposed at the end of 2024. They say doing things like maintaining written security policies and updating them regularly would create “substantial new financial burdens.” Maybe they could use AI. (Too soon?)
CVS is launching an engagement platform, which could optimistically be viewed as a way to help people access low-acuity retail care or cynically viewed as a way to get people to buy more stuff at CVS.

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…