Episode Details

We’re going live (here) Tuesday, March 17th at 11:30am ET.

I bumped into the FHIR Data guy on Substack after reading his version of a very similar thought experiment with Claude for healthcare last month. I invited him into the show and then we made sure to rendezvous during my breif time at HIMSS in Vegas last week. We managed to record a quick rif and photographic evidence of our meetup and it’s shared above. Yes I look exhausted in this one. Yes the writing is on the wall that I will get hit by a freight train by immune system later that night. But alas, humans still have human constraints.

Like me, Gene is a healthcare veteran, but he has been deep on the data side of things (large provider systems, payers, PBMs), digital health startup founder, interoperability platform builder. He writes Fire Data Guy on Substack, and five years ago did something most people with that kind of institutional knowledge never do: he left. He’s also built a consumer-facing interoperability platform from scratch. Started writing about what patients could actually do with their own data if someone showed them how. He’s right up our alley. A System C thinker in a System B world.

Our current plan, which as everyone here knows is completely subject to change is have a live, hands-on demonstration of how to pull your own health insurance claims data, de-identify it, and use Claude to build a family health dashboard - longitudinal timelines, financial summaries, and those “gotcha” moments in your coverage you’ve never been able to surface. Gene has built a de-identification tool specifically so privacy-conscious participants can follow along safely.

Carter’s goal for everyone is that by the end of the episode, you’ll know exactly how to do this yourself - that night, if you want. Which really means you have at least an inkling of how you might go about doing such a thing. Moreso if you’ve done more than use AI as a glorified version of Google, which is where most everyone is at the moment.

35% of U.S. healthcare spending is administrative overhead. Most patients are walking into every encounter with no briefing documents and no backup. AI is the equalizer - but only if you know how to use it. This is a how-to of sorts.

While it’s tactical, the reason we are doing this isn’t to focus on optimizing System B. It’s about the importance of giving individuals the agency that was previously available only to large healthcare organizations - a first step toward a world where patients aren’t the least informed party in every healthcare transaction.

For those of you who’ve been following our AI doctor panel series, including the yet to be published 45 minute deep dive yesterday into Ellen’s most recent foray with Claude. Here is the most recent discussion with Pryce Ancona

Where I figured out how to make my data useful, Gene figured out how to build the tools to make it secure, structured, and something a regular human being can actually use without a computer science degree.

We grabbed a few minutes in the media lounge at HIMSS before I bolted for my flight on the first officialy day. You watch the clip.

But that conversation was maybe 10% of what Gene and I and I got into on our prep call. The real thing is happening Tuesday, March 17th at 11:30am ET, and if you’ve ever stared at an EOB you couldn’t parse, gotten a bill that made zero sense, or just wondered what all those years of labs and claims data actually add up to, add the livestream session to your calendar and pull up a chair.

HIMSS In A Fe