Hey y’all,
It's been a full week over here. The Spark is one week out and we're nearly sold out — if you've been on the fence, this is your nudge. Get your ticket here →
We've also had some really great conversations with a few different community partners and our Spring/Summer calendar is quickly filling up. More to come on that front.
In the meantime, here's what we've been reading.
ONE BIG THING
The AI billing arms race has a poster child: sepsis.
Photo Credit to pvproductions on Freepik
Sepsis hospitalizations in Massachusetts have tripled since 2010. Actual disease incidence has barely moved. The gap is billing.
What's happening: Hospitals deploy documentation tools that scan clinical notes and surface every defensible diagnosis. Low calcium becomes hypocalcemia. A persistent cough becomes COPD. A sepsis code pays roughly $10K more per claim than a standard infection. No one is committing fraud. The system is doing exactly what the incentives tell it to do.
The arms race: Payers use AI to deny claims. Providers use AI to build stronger ones. Both sides add overhead. Neither improves patient outcomes. One patient in the article discovered her records listed a COPD diagnosis she never knew she had — after being denied long-term disability insurance.
Why health innovators should care: Every ambient scribe, documentation tool, and revenue cycle platform deployed in a health system touches this dynamic. The payment system rewards the code, not the care. The technology is working as designed. The design is the problem. Read more →
WEEKLY ROUNDUP
Here’s what we’re reading
The Trump administration missed the federal 210-day deadline to nominate a permanent CDC director, leaving Jay Bhattacharya running both the CDC and NIH simultaneously while morale at the agency sits at an all-time low, measles cases top 1,000, and roughly a quarter of the workforce has left since last year.
Congress created a $50B Rural Health Transformation fund meant to offset Medicaid cuts in rural communities, but in Montana and at least nine other states, the money comes with strings that could push hospitals to "right-size" services, which in practice may mean cutting them.
Researchers at Kumamoto University developed a peptide that helps insulin survive digestion and absorb through the intestinal wall, bringing the 100-year-old dream of an insulin pill meaningfully closer to clinical reality.
A new study found that women and early-career researchers bore a disproportionate share of the NIH grant terminations, with women losing nearly 58% of their unspent grant funds on average versus 48% for men, and early-career scientists losing hundreds of millions in training grants at the exact moment they most needed them.
YOU CAN FIND ME IN THE A
Community Spotlight
Shoutout to our advisor Patrick Kennedy, who was on a panel at TAG Digital Health’s event earlier this week, talking value-based care and patient centricity. Patrick has a way of cutting through the theory and getting to what's actually hard about this work — where the incentives break down, and where they don't. Good stuff. Go follow him if you don't already.
Next Week: The Spark
We're a week out from our inaugural speaker series, and we're nearly sold out.
On April 1st, Bonne Fire ATL and Emory's Rollins School of Public Health are hosting Elizabeth Sprouse, MPH — Chief Public Health Informatics Officer at Emory Healthcare — for an evening conversation at Manuel's Tavern. Elizabeth sits at the crossroads of clinical operations and public health infrastructure, and she has a lot worth hearing.
It's a small room by design. A handful of tickets are left. If you've been meaning to register, do it now. Register →
