Ladies and gentlemen, we did it. SB 79 has been signed.

"This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gondor," i holler as i overturn my uncle's funeral pyre and turn the 4th Age of Man into the 4th Age of Shit

Consolidation in the EHR market -- where there are 2 dominant vendors -- is creating a big risk of a catastrophic cybersecurity event. @ajh.bsky.social, @natea.bsky.social, and I ponder the possibility of a "single-point-of-failure" risk in the EHR market in this Health Affairs Scholar commentary

It’s that time of year again: The information session for Harvard’s PhD in Health Policy will be held a month from today, on Tuesday, October 28. Register here (recording will be available for those who can’t make it): harvard.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

now there is an interesting diff-in-diff

🧪 I’m thrilled that @amia.org has compiled its inaugural starter pack! Follow all these pioneering researchers and clinicians shaping the future of medicine through their work in medical AI, clinical innovation, digital health policy, and patient advocacy. #MedSky #WhyInformatics #MedAI 🩺💻

Fuck it fixed effects for everything. Fixed effects never hurt a goddamn soul.

More broadly, there is this trend to just... ignore the linear passage of time and the fact that people update their beliefs. It is totally reasonable to have different opinions now than you did in summer 2020!

Yesterday: the economists were wrong, tariffs are clearly working Today: Ok, we need to fire the economists because the jobs data doesn't look good

It has been a wild day to get an NIH grant.

uhh well maybe lol

Obviously a strange time, but thrilled to receive my first R01 from NLM. Excited to combine some of my favorite things (instrumental variables and EHR metadata) to develop context-specific causal estimates of the value of viewing outside data delivered via HIE w/ MPI @natea.bsky.social

Excited to get this grant submitted and some papers revised so I can spend this weekend enjoying my true passion: cooking up a weird little instrumental variables paper.

My favorite Colbert moment: This performance aired right before the pandemic and I watched it nearly every night from 2020 to 2022 youtu.be/T_qkVPZ8DJI?...

If he had a good reason I'd probably be okay with my dog eating me now.

Skill issue cause I’m a white dude with no connections (first gen college!) and I went to Michigan and Harvard just fine.

only logged in to eRA commons to see if my grant moved from "pending administrative review" yet 6 times today, not bad.

"If Kennedy really wants to limit industry influence in health policy and the health care system, the most impactful thing he could do is to roll back the funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health." schaeffer.usc.edu/research/wha...

Big mistake I made was not travelling cheaply more when I was in graduate school. I have a lot more money as faculty but honestly no time to travel, or even plan vacations.

its kind of crazy how much discourse this generated when it turned out to be a data error on the part of NYT.

#HAScholar @Health_Affairs celebrates 2nd anniversary! Now in leading indices & w/ a preliminary impact factor, we provide rapid and high quality review & publication. > 250,000 full text downloads in 2024! Two years of publishing: onward and upward. academic.oup.com/healthaffair...

I heard this morning that my informatics colleague Dr. Atul Butte passed after a battle with cancer. He was a giant in the field & inspired many of us over his distinguished career. He was a passionate champion of the power of big data & his impact on our field is immeasurable. RIP Atul & thanks.

underrated part of academic conferences right now is learning new ways to respond to "how are you doing" (variations on a friend's favorite: "with year fixed effects...")

luckily getting NIH funding and maintaining a research lab in a soft money environment is like, super easy and chill, this isn't turning my already high stress levels to 1000 or anything, ha ha.

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.

the people who screamed about national suicide from immigrants are going to commit actual no shit national suicide.

when in doubt, add fixed effects?

The political media is obsessively relitigating the issue of Biden being too old and out of touch while the current president babbles incoherently at press conferences and regularly admits he's not the one making decisions on key policy matters.

Mark McClellan notes the rapid evolution of the Medicare program and need for reforms and legislation that can address the challenges for both Medicare Advantage and Traditional Medicare as the former continues to rapidly grow. academic.oup.com/healthaffair...

Chicago Pope's here

I have in general become way less tolerant of ‘crunchy’ bullshit since ascension of people like RFK jr. to actual power. Sorry but the obnoxious Reddit science and logic guys were right, you should be scorned for believing objectively wrong things about consequential issues.

🫡

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the Trump administration is so incompetent. I think it is because of the type of person Donald Trump is, the type of people who want to work for him and the process he uses for screening out talent.

Highly disturbing story about DOGE but this detail is particularly chilling www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...

How many hospitalized patients need care in the ICU? How many of them survive? What interventions do they receive there? These are some of the questions I had two years ago while trying to write the "background" section for my masters thesis. But I couldn't find the answers... they did not exist.

Harvard stands up Letter to the Harvard community from President Garber

🚨 Rethinking Moral Hazard: Moral hazard in health insurance—the increased spending that comes when you get insured—is usually seen as wasteful due to insurance’s price distortion. This paper challenges that view.

That ‘I find myself having to defend someone I think is annoying from someone I know is dangerous’ quote really is a good distillation of our times. And many people in the center evidently think this is a difficult decision.

Uhh so I realize this is an insane thing to tweet but if any senior faculty have experience with political censorship of a scientific talk… DM me?

The final version of the paper includes an alternate analysis (DD-IV) that addresses the main concern in this post. The finding is robust. The “September effect” only really occurs in the vaccine eligibility year, not other years.

you try to have one discussion about collider bias on X, the Everything App, and suddenly you "hate white people." buddy i own multiple barbour jackets, including one for my dog. i'm the final boss of white people.

Republicans said they wanted to repeal the 20th century and they’re acting like it. Trying to get back to 19th century productivity and living standards as well.

Hell yeah UCSF strong 💪

Genuinely terrifying.

This money was appropriated by the Congress, under law, to support innovation—bedrock of American prosperity and security. That law has not been amended to make its faithful execution contingent on the president’s whims. Our representatives must enforce our Constitution.

It is also remarkable how much Twitter has degraded. I usually use the desktop app and get this screen with no tweets and nothing working about 35% of the time or so now

got me ngl I am feeling “soul crushing”

🚨HRSA's Area Health Resources Files webpage is now down. Fortunately, I built an archive of data 2000-2023 for a previous project, which can be accessed without restriction here: data.mendeley.com/datasets/dwf...