Tag: cloud computing

The Beastwood Files: March(ish) 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

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: October 2025

~ iambeastwood ~ Leave a comment

Writing this one amid recovery from my first colonoscopy. As a few people told me, the prep was the most difficult part – in particular, trying to function without eating for close to 30 hours. I don’t know how people do this routinely. (I was ready to fight someone for a sandwich within seven hours of fasting, but it wouldn’t have been a very good fight because I had no energy.) All the more reason to 1) make less invasive options for cancer screening more readily available and 2) make sure people get the food they need.

Stuff I Wrote

Stuff I Did

  • Got my COVID and flu vaccines
  • Ran the BayState Marathon in 3:24:31 – the fifth marathon I’ve done since the spring of 2022 within a 2-minute range around 3:25, which if nothing else apparently means I’m consistent
  • Finally finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower, which I started roughly a year ago
  • Started wearing a hat and gloves outside in the morning, which I’ll likely be doing until mid-April
  • Decorated several pumpkins, none of which stayed on our stoop for more than 48 hours because there are hungry rats in our neighborhood
  • Dressed as a car for Halloween to complement my son the crossing guard and my wife the crosswalk

Adventures in Fatherhood

  • The current phrase of the moment is A December to Remember. I initially said this in jest while fruitfully listing the months of the year, as I have no intention of ever buying my wife a Lexus for Christmas (nor does she), but it has since prompted serious conversations about what is and is not practical to give to someone as a holiday gift.
  • We have resumed the annual cool weather tradition of Family Star Pants, which is when we all wear navy blue pajama pants with white stars. (They’re from Primary; I’d add a link, but they don’t sell these specific pants any more). In an added wrinkle, I was asked to wear them to preschool drop-off. We walked. Did I mention these pants have no pockets?
  • We made it around the block for trick-or-treating. We’re still young enough to only pick one treat per house – and at half the houses, he picked either toys or candy that he knows other members of the family like. (Papa, for example, likes Peanut M&M’s.)
  • I made a group of tweens very happy on Halloween night at about 7:30 when I said, “I need your help. It’s time to put my kid to bed, and I want to turn off the porch light. Can you please just take the rest of the candy out of this bowl for me?”

This Month in Digital Health: Everything Is Not Awesome

~ iambeastwood ~ Leave a comment

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.