Monday Morning Update 12/29/25

Top News

New York Governor Kathy Hochul vetoes the New York Health Information Privacy Act, which would have required companies that handle health-related information to obtain user consent before storing or selling that data.

The bill defined Regulated Health Information to include data from apps, wearables, telehealth, and employer-provided health information.

Critics said that the definition was so broad that it could encompass non-health data, impose complex and costly compliance requirements, threaten innovation, and create unnecessary burdens for health systems.

HIStalk Announcements and Requests

Most provider poll respondents say that remote patient monitoring payment changes won’t really affect them.

New poll to your right or here: What primary role should HIMSS choose to maintain or increase its business success? This question addresses big-picture strategy, but leave a poll comment after voting to suggest the #1 thing HIMSS should do within the next year to position itself for the future.

HIStalk supporters and vendor marketing folks: Current HIStalk sponsors get free spotlights and text ads, while prospective ones can talk to Lorre about the benefits of full-year exposure. Startups and former sponsors might even get a lagniappe. Lorre also has a single Top Spot banner for companies that are seeking maximal exposure (10,000 clicks in the past year) and the satisfaction of always seeing their ad atop those of competitors. Sponsors get zero influence over news and opinion, but that’s to their advantage since decision-makers will bail quickly on thinly veiled pay-for-play and inexpert babbling.

News is understandably slow, so let’s enjoy the results of reader donations to Donors Choose. Dr. K says that her Florida first graders started using their new STEM materials immediately after she explained, “I told them that they were donated to our classroom by people who wanted to help them learn.”

Meanwhile, new reader donations, matched with third-party donations and funds from my Anonymous Vendor Executive, fully funded these Donors Choose teacher grant requests:

• Visual learning tools for Ms. W’s Honors Algebra and Geometry middle school classes in Oklahoma City, OK.
• STEAM manipulatives for Ms. W’s elementary school class in Oklahoma City, OK.
• Headphones for Ms. S’s elementary school class in Burlington, NC.
• Math manipulatives for Ms. M’s disability needs middle school math class in Charlestown, MA.
• STEM toys for Ms. N’s elementary school class in Brighton, MA.
• A laptop to support robotics coding and 3D printing in Mr. G’s high school class in Bloomfield, NM.
• A math classroom (learning tools, organizers, sensory tools, and supplies) for Ms. K’s elementary school class in Dorchester, MA.

Sponsored Events and Resources

None scheduled soon. Contact Lorre to have your resource listed.

Announcements and Implementations

Peer-reviewed studies find that Linus Health’s AI-based digital cognitive assessments can detect subtle behavioral signals that are associated with Alzheimer’s pathology years before symptoms appear, allowing early identification of people who should be tested for blood-based biomarkers.

Black Book Research posts its annual report on the standards it uses to rank health tech products and services. The company does not sell consulting, advisory, or improvement services to vendors, does not offer paid placements, does not pay survey participants, and offers no pay-to-play options such as offering score improvement services and related recognition. This statement caught my eye:

Black Book’s annual refresh cycle is informed by a widely recognized measurement principle often referred to as Goodhart’s Law: once a measure becomes a target, it can become less effective as a measure. In vendor rankings, stable rubrics can unintentionally encourage optimization for what performs well in the scoring system rather than what consistently delivers implementation success, operational reliability, service responsiveness, and realized value after contract signature. Over time, a ranking can drift toward measuring “ability to rank” instead of “ability to deliver.”

Government and Politics

A federal grand jury indicts the physician owner of a clinic for allegedly billing Medicare $45 million for Botox injections that were medically unnecessary and, in many cases, never provided. Violetta Mailyan, DO is also charged with obstructing a criminal investigation by allegedly submitting falsified medical records in response to a grand jury subpoena. Prosecutors say the clinic billed for services on dates when it was closed, when Mailyan was traveling outside the country, and on at least one date when the Medicare patient was incarcerated in federal prison.

Other

The New York Times profiles the kidney transplant-matching National Kidney Registry, which transfers much of its millions of dollars in annual income – collected mostly via hospital fees – to for-profit technology and holding companies that were formed by Founder and CEO Garet Hil, who developed the software that matches donors to recipients. NKR had $69 million in annual revenue in 2023 and paid Hil’s technology company $8.2 million when it sold the commercial operations portion to Hil for $2.6 million.

I was fascinated by a New Yorker article titled “The Role of Doctors is Changing Forever,” written by Weill Cornell hospitalist Dhruv Khullar, MD, MPP. He says that doctors are losing their cultural authority as patients seek “unbundled” medical advice and services outside of traditional practice. Doctors once reigned as the gatekeeper to everything that relates to health, but now people are obtaining and trusting information from attention-optimizing TikTok docs, direct-to-consumer companies, the MAHA movement, and AI, causing people to trust doctors less or to avoid them entirely. He writes this, although glossing over how doctors might actually earn a living in this new role:

When a hegemon loses status, it can take a few paths. It can aim for restoration — bringing back the empire — which in this case would probably focus on gatekeeping. It can retreat, which might mean abdicating medicine’s broad public role, perhaps in favor of a narrow focus on earnings and technical skills. The last — and, in my view, the best — path is reinvention. Doctors can remake their profession by embracing the multi-polar medical landscape they now inhabit, and by acting as a kind of system stabilizer: working with other powers to help shape rules, norms, and relationships.

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