Newsday: OpenAI's Big Healthcare Launch and a New Age of Personal Records

I'm Bill Russell, creator of this week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare one connection at a time. Welcome to Newsday, breaking Down the Health it headlines that matter most. Let's jump into the news.

Bill Russell: All right. It is Newsday. It is Newsday, and it's been quite the week. We have CES going on. I watched a couple videos from that. That was, man robots Everywhere. Very interesting to watch.

Um, I.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: In the boxing ring, robots in the like. It's fun. It's just amazing.

Bill Russell: Sir, big robots, little robots, robot with wheels, robots with tracks, robots with, you know, quad eds bipeds. Clearly this is where it's going. We will we'll touch on Jensen Wong's. Stuff a little bit. because that video to me was really interesting and I, and actually, I mean, we can touch on it now.

People are like, oh, the sustainability of ai, it's just not there. That kinda stuff. And then Jensen Wong essentially gets up and says, you know, x less power. And oh, by the way liquid cooled with warm water. I'm like liquid cooled with warm water, meaning you don't even have to chill the water, so you don't even have to refrigerator it.

So it's not gonna use power to refrigerate. Just take any water out of a lake, whatever, run it over the chips, put it back in the lake, away you go. I mean, it's very low energy, low output kind of stuff. And so it's like we're seeing progress and then we will continue to progress. Like we will continue to solve these kinds of issues with.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: There's a saying that we've heard probably in the last few months that this is the worst that it's ever gonna be. Like the technology only gets better from here. And in the spirit of just things are going, innovation, we don't have power or we don't have something, that's when innovation really happens.

Bill Russell: By the way, we should react. Like we should be like, look, we can't take this much power off the grid. It doesn't even exist. It doesn't exist it because that's what like triggers 'em to go. Alright. Yeah. Alright.

Oh,

Sarah Richardson: my

Bill Russell: nope.

Sarah Richardson: mirror. I've been wanting that since that tricorder thing from the X Factor came out like years ago. Do you remember that?

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: No.

Sarah Richardson: What?

Bill Russell: haven't been tracking that.

Sarah Richardson: Come on, Drex. That's been around for like the tricorders, like Star Trek

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: I know what the truck,

Sarah Richardson: But now that neurologic mirror and we think about it, you step on your scale that has your mirror. Then it's all, it's constantly looking for trending in your body. So you're gonna have a

Bill Russell: I know I said man. So CES has become, I don't know if it's a go-to event because [00:04:00] I don't go to it, but man, I wouldn't mind going to it, man. It looks fun

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: I have a lot of friends who go and they always say that it is huge amount of fun and that there's 90% of what you see is just like, these people even thinking? But there's 10 or 15% of it that is just like, wow, what are these people thinking? You know? So it's kind of cool.

Yeah. Maybe next year we'll put that on our trip list.

Sarah Richardson: Yeah. And then decide if we do JP Morgan. because that's next week and people keep asking us if we're gonna be there. So we've actually got some cool things we could start hanging out at next year that people are asking us if we're there.

Bill Russell: We will be in Silicon Valley next week together,

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Uhhuh.

Bill Russell: We will not be going to the JP Morgan conference, but we'll be close enough that I'm gonna get a chance to talk to some of the people in the Valley. So it'll be, it'll be good. That'll be fun.

I the announcement of the week, I hope this airs sooner rather than later. This might be two weeks out and people are like, oh that's so old. I think this conversation's gonna go on for a while. So the two big announcements in our world, and it's all over my feed.

I saw the architecture for this. It's really fascinating. Has the ability to bring in all the information from Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, you name it. I mean your aura ring, your, I mean, so they created that ecosystem. It does bring in some of the medical information some of the medical records.

Information from, oh gosh, what I'm blanking right now. How can you blank on the middle of the show? You should have this information in front of you. Awesome. But you know, some of the players that actually have aggregated that information, they're a part of the Teka framework that you can bring that into this.

ChatGPT Health for the patient. is this the the grandchild of the personal health record?

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: This is the grandchild of the personal health record. I've been talking about personal health records, like, okay, the tech is there, we're getting there. We have APIs. We can actually get the information now. And then this announcement yesterday, and I was just like. This is it. This is the root. This is how we do personal health records and being able to connect it to research projects and, you know, all this struggle today of like finding great candidates for my cohort That might be, there's a solve here for that, I think.

Sarah Richardson: And if you're a patient, you might actually get to monetize the sharing of your information on your terms.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: How about that?

Bill Russell: I assume you guys have seen the social media conversations around this. You have the. Probably appropriately cautious people who are saying, look, ChatGPT has already been linked to potential suicide. It's been linked to, you know, overdose, I think in one case, whatever.

So they have these things sort of pending. And by the way, it's like one case here, one case here kind of stuff. It's not like it's a mass. Thing that's going on. But but they are very real concerns and they're like, look, do we really want people asking questions with their own health data and that kind of stuff.

Sarah Richardson: people who already uses it to track nutrition, exercise, all kinds of things that I'm not gonna ask it. What dosage should I take of a medication? However, I am saying like, Hey, I wasn't as hungry today as yesterday, but I wanna have a high protein snack before my workout.

What do you recommend? And it's like, here's this. And it says, how would you? And hey, here's the workout you should do today based on the fact that you have 80% of your normal energy. That's the kind of stuff I use it for. I have all these program folders and all kinds of cool stuff in there. Built,

Bill Russell: I think they're getting smarter on this too. because I have asked it about dosage of some of the stuff that I'm taking and it doesn't say, Hey, yeah, you should up your doses. Not like I could've done it anyway. But it does say, Hey, you know, interesting with these readings and this dosage, you might want to talk to your doctor about blah, blah, blah.

Fill in the blank. Okay, well that makes me an engaged patient. I would think that would be good. Right.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Mm-hmm.

Bill Russell: This is interesting because one of the reasons, so, back when I was CIO, we were at the early stages of the bands the Fitbit bands and Whoop and whatever, and I had conversation. I was the naive person from outside and I had conversations with doctors about bringing this stuff into the medical record and they about, you know, took out their pitchforks and wanted to and again, for good reason, they're like, look, we already have.

So much information to read. There's no way I could possibly. And then the second is liability. It's like, look, if you put that in the medical record, it is assumed that we have read it. We are taking this into account. We are doing all these things and we don't want to assume that liability.

No, no health system is really taking liability. And if I thought about the shield that chatGPT has here, it's almost the same thing as a social media platform, which is like. Hey, you know what? We're just a platform. Like we're just creating a place where they can interact with this and they can ask questions.

And so the liability sort of goes away, and I think it's what we've sort of been asking for and it's empowered, I feel empowered by this.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: So you're gonna have your personal health record-ish thing in GPT, maybe it's gonna connect to your health system and maybe it's gonna feed info to your health system. Are we gonna have a terms of service connection to the health system that says, just because you're sharing this information doesn't mean we're using it for diagnosis and treatment, or something like

Bill Russell: But this is the thing at this point, it's one way into ChatGPT. It's not, I don't believe it's two way. Right? So the only

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: is the worst it gets, so

Bill Russell: Right,

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: get there.

Bill Russell: but I don't think, would you ever feed the health record from chat? Would you ever put something into Epic from ChatGPT?

Sarah Richardson: Why wouldn't you take your summary or anything else that you have or test results

Bill Russell: In that direction. I agree with you a thousand percent. I'm gonna pull ev as much as I can, figure out a way to,

Sarah Richardson: Yes.

Bill Russell: there, there will be some stickiness, sticky points here that the EHRs are like, Hey, wait, you know, how much are we actually going to give? But I think they're kind of, their hands are kind of tied with information sharing here.

Information blocking rules. I think they're gonna have to share it with me. And then I have a choice of what to do with that information. And my choice is I'm gonna put it into this private, secure area. And I'm gonna start, in theory, what we've said, probably for the better part of a couple years, I'm gonna be able to start asking questions around my health based on my record.

It definitely gives you a space that lets you put all of your records in one place and then start to really own that [00:13:00] data.

Bill Russell: The numbers are. CHATT users in the US daily. This is daily, is somewhere around 80 million daily. All right, so there's 330. These numbers are old probably, but roughly 330 million people in the United States. You take certain. Parts of that out that are never going to use this kind of platform. Maybe like the, you know, 2-year-old, at least today, the two year old's not using it.

And and I, but my parents are 89. They're using it.

Sarah Richardson: Yeah.

Bill Russell: so yeah, this is a truly democratized tool. And the only reason I think that number's at what it is because they have competitors. They have Gemini, they have clawed, they have others. And I think if we took the total number of users using this kind of thing, it would be pretty staggering at this point.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Yeah.

Bill Russell: Then they hired a whole bunch of healthcare people and they were going to make the search engine be much more valuable than it was before for healthcare. It would identify, you know, places you could go and proper documents to see on the internet versus the. Misinformation that's out there.

So they got into the sort of classifying documents and whatnot and made the search a thousand times better than it was when we started. So they have a history here. Claude, not so much, but but this architecture doesn't look hard to replicate to me.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: I think they're right on their tails. If the, given the reaction that we've seen in whatever it's been 24 hours since the announcement there's gotta be. People scrambling to make this happen at the other companies too.

Early adoption by major US health systems include Advent Health, HCA, Boston Children's, Cedar-Sinai, Stanford Medicine. Children's health amongst others still requires caution around AI accuracy and privacy, with emphasis that it supports rather than replaces clinical judgment. So this is, I equate this to the conversation I had with Mike Peffer and what Stanford had created a sandbox and it was a secure, private, protected governed.

That's essentially what this is. I think when I see negatives on this, on online, it's a lot of people going, oh, you can't trust it for this. Can't trust it for this. And I'm reading, I'm going. That's not what they're doing. They're not trying to replace Epic's ai. They're trying to create a safe, monitored, governed space that we can go to our organization and say, Hey.

If you wanna start playing around with this, we can move this information in. And here's the data streams that you can move in. And by the way, it's HIPAA compliant, it's cure it's all the things that if people haven't heard it. I interviewed Effer this week, so you could listen to that. And we talk specifically about this and what they've learned over the course of a year of having reps on this and the value it's had.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: I think there's the, you know, you kind of start with the idea of helping everyone understand if there's one thing you should take away from the conversation today about this that is there are these capabilities where you can create a private area that is just for your health system that runs. The GPT that you see every day, but it's just for you, private to you and only for your information.

So they ask a another new interesting question, which causes you to create a new dashboard or something. We almost have the speedy version of that. The Stanford folks are looking at the questions that are asked, and that's how they're realizing. man, that is a really good question. I didn't even know we could think about asking a question like that of the medical records. totally should be building that into some kind of workflow that sets alerts or does other things that helps us treat patients better. So, I mean, it's a just such a really interesting capability to me to see as a kind of data hippie, like I love the idea of

Sarah Richardson: Data hippie, like budget dust. You have a lot of really

Bill Russell: he does. He.

You get in front of some of your single sign-on, you create really good audit trails, governance frameworks. Think about risk management elements. I mean, I guess it still could reduce some of the burden with some of the other perspectives, but then you spend more time focusing on, is there other unsafe medical advice? Perspective is being put out there or context isn't clear that we need to clean up, or how do we make sure that if we're gonna integrate this with a personal health record, that the duplication of information is reconciled and that gets served up to make sure that the patient doesn't have conflicting information.

Let's learn from what it's telling us. We need to be focusing on instead of just trying to figure out if we're gonna use it at all. Guess what that's out of the gate already.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: It's not just clinical information either, right? It's also business operations stuff and all kinds of other things that that you can use it to quit. The one thing I haven't really heard, bill, maybe you know. you know, affordability, like, do we know the model or the pricing model or on any of this stuff yet?

Bill Russell: I don't know it for GPT for healthcare, but I would imagine it's just part of the normal licensing agreement. So it'll be so much per user, per month kind of thing. So as we. Know they're struggling with these escalating per user per month AI costs that are being thrown at 'em. The GPT for health, I think it's just gonna be part of the GPT that I get for 20 bucks a month.

Bill Russell: Yeah.

Sarah Richardson: your doctor for you ahead of time because something you don't even know has been manifesting. That is being surfaced through this level of interoperability, interactivity,

Bill Russell: I think this is the point. It's the grandson of the granddaughter, whatever, of the grandchild. That's what you say. Okay. Grand grandchild, child's still a term, right? We can still say.

Bill Russell: Okay. All right. Great grandchild of the personal health record.

This is where everything aggregates. CES was the I mean the amount of AI they're putting into these personal devices the whitings has 96 elements. Not only do you step on the scale, but you actually grab something and hold it and it's checking all sorts of devices.

I had lunch with with Alistair Erskine over the break. And he was showing me the new whoop statistics that he's tracking. And I had stopped using the whoop probably about a year and a half, two years ago. But I'm contemplating getting another one because he was just showing me all the stuff.

It's tracking and it gives them like your. A biological age versus your actual age. And he's like, and I'm working on this and it's telling me what to do in order, you know, get a little bit more sleep here and drink more water and exercise more. And drex, I notice you're not standing up. Are we supposed to hold you accountable to standing up this year?

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: I just, I've been standing up all morning and I sat down for this.

Bill Russell: I've heard that.

Sarah Richardson: You've heard that probably for me for like years and now you're tired of me talking about

An idea though.

Bill, let's put you on like four devices and have you do like an experiment for like Q2. You have your Aura ring, your Whoop your Apple

Bill Russell: I.

Sarah Richardson: something else and we're gonna track Bill's health record for a quarter and see which one has the best, you know,

Bill Russell: I am more than happy to do that. I will tell you, I started I hadn't seen a primary care physician in over a decade and last year was the year I finally went and saw a primary care physician got all hooked up, did all the tests. I finally have a cardiologist by name that I is my cardiologist and all those things.

because my family history is that way and whatnot. So I would be more than happy to do some of that stuff. I'm also on GLP ones now. I'm not gonna say which one but essentially you know, I've always struggled to lose weight and I'm down like 12 pounds since whatever, but is that the right way to lose weight?

Sarah Richardson: and the GL. P one. That's kind of the,

Bill Russell: I, it does help. I can't it does help. It's been really.

Sarah Richardson: now not eating out of processed bags of food as much?

Bill Russell: That's part of the, that's part of the challenge. You're eating less and you have to force yourself to make sure you're eating, you know, enough protein, you're replacing the junk with good stuff. Now you will see me at some events we have coming up and you'll see what I eat and what I donate.

Especially protein and water are the two things I'm trying to make sure I take in, especially a lot of water.

Sarah Richardson: This is my ChatGPT sample weekly menu that is GLP one friendly and protein anchored along with all my exercise and my travel snacks. I too went on a GLP one for myriad reasons. I've lost

Bill Russell: And looking good too, by the way. Nice hat.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Really nice hat.

Bill Russell: Look at that Alex's lemonade stand.

Sarah Richardson: the Lemon.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Yeah. Looks good.

Bill Russell: So everybody, everybody now has a branded hat. Drex has the Seattle grunge skater dude hat. Sarah has, what am I gonna call this? We call it the pink lemonade hat internally.

Sarah Richardson: Lemonade hat. It's like it's, it was developed. It was actually our friends at Providence came up with the idea, our lady friends. And we now have the pink lemonade hat that is a trucker hat. So

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Pink lemonade trucker. There's guys can wear this hat too. This is a great hat.

Sarah Richardson: it

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Totally.

Sarah Richardson: Thank

Bill Russell: All right.

Sarah Richardson: and Lisa for the idea.

Bill Russell: Yeah. We have some fun things coming up. We've got a couple of events you guys are gonna come out to Southern southeast Florida. We have A-C-M-I-O event and we have our first women's summit. Sarah, you're gonna lead that up. I'm gonna talk to those people.

By the way, at some point there's gonna be at least one man in the room.

Sarah Richardson: already voted and said yes, you could

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: You're off the island. Oh no, you're on the island.

Sarah Richardson: is that we wanna see you Saturday morning so that we can convince you we wanna do it again next

Bill Russell: All right. Well we will have that conversation. And then drex, we're gonna turn around and go to Hotel Dell in San Diego. I think that's our first CISO event of the year. Right.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: is. That's right.

A great crew there too. I mean, man, what a, it's a, I can't believe it. You look at the people in the room and it's just like, what a blowout group.

Sarah Richardson: Yeah.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: super excited about that.

Bill Russell: Well, and this week I launched my first foray into fiction. Thank you for your input. But I wanna put it out there for everybody who's reading this. Like, yesterday A CTO sent me their the fictional company is statics that ups the, the licensing fees by 400% to the organization.

From people, and I purposely made this a female CIO very competent 20 years in the industry. CIO. I'm hoping that when I get together with the with the women on Saturday morning, they have some ideas of some storylines I can throw into this. There's,

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: that this is a crowdsourced. Help us choose the adventure.

Sarah Richardson: Yeah.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: fiction driven.

Bill Russell: and they're all going through it.

It's not like this is.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: yeah. No, right. Everybody can relate. I mean, I sent you a note. It was like, oh my God, the PTSD, this sucks, but keep going.

Sarah Richardson: Got lots of fodder right now. You've got people who had ransomware. I could be going through some of that stuff right now. You people who got, oh, you just won a great award and you just got displaced. because your CEO wants somebody different. Like there is no shortage of content. It's a matter of how we, you know, continue to make it approachable for people.

Bill Russell: There, there will be. I'm picturing we're gonna follow Sarah Chen for no, by the way, I didn't pick the name because of you.

Sarah Richardson: Well,

Bill Russell: but there you go. I should have said I did. Anyway.

Sarah Richardson: right now.

Bill Russell: Sarah Chen, we will follow her for three books. I have the other two books.

They're one word titles for each. The next one will be called Breached, and we will follow her through a 30 day ransomware event. And I'll get input from some of our friends in the field who have gone through that and try to make that real. It's part of the reason I went with fiction.

We hear so much stuff that we can't. Share and at tribute to anybody. And fiction gives you the ability to still tell the story and to give people the experience and the lessons that those CIOs portray to us. And you could give it to the larger audience. So Breached will be the second one.

The third one is Fire is the title for the third one. And it's.

Bill Russell: Yeah. And it's gonna be following somebody from being let go at, you know, at an organization to the journey through that, to their next gig. So those, that's gonna be the three, three parts series that we're gonna follow Sarah Chen.

And then we will, if people still want to want us to do it, we will continue to do it. We'll figure out, um.

Sarah Richardson: ever been fired?

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: No, I don't

Bill Russell: It would be so hard to fire Drex, don't you think? calming, you know, just,

Sarah Richardson: Drex, you know.

Bill Russell: you're kind of a keeper.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: I'll keep hanging out here for a while.

Bill Russell: Oh, man. We should do Bobbleheads this year too. I don't know. I've just.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: that's amazing.

Bill Russell: Here's even better. Let's do Bobbleheads of all of our 2 29 attendees and like give them a Bobblehead, but keep a bobblehead and then they can like trade 'em with each other and stuff.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: shelf above us with all of our

Bill Russell: All the CIO Bobbleheads and CISO bobbleheads and, I don't know, that would be too much fun.

Sarah Richardson: stuff.

Bill Russell: are we allowed to have that much fun?

I think we're allowed to.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Mm-hmm.

Biking, the Nan Dodo trail which is gonna be awesome. We have the golf tournament.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: we just saw the jersey. That has

Bill Russell: It's cool, isn't it?

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: this, right? The bike jersey. And it's you for the listeners, like you're if you ride a bike and you're in the East Coast, you need to be a part of that too.

Sarah Richardson: And we've already got people asking to help with that ride,

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Yeah.

Sarah Richardson: it's virtual on your Peloton or headed out to Pennsylvania. So, thank you to this community because being able to do what we do for childhood cancer research is really special.

That's where you get the shoes. We have hats. We have shoes. We now have three different hats, three different well, shoes are not unlimited, but they're custom

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: shoes change over time. And by the way, there will be in 26, a black edition of the shoes, and there will be a

Bill Russell: painted pink edition of the shoes.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: and I have been talking about that too. So.

Sarah Richardson: Yeah, Julie Easton said she gets the first pair, so we're on it.

Bill Russell: This is just the fun we get to have over here

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: good,

Bill Russell: while, While making a difference. Hey uh, thanks for thanks for this and look forward to the to the next conversation.