Today in health, it we're going to run through the headlines. We've got an Amazon story. Remote work. And fair and unfair practices in remote work. Apple gets sued. And of course we will talk about change healthcare. My name is bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week health set of channels and events dedicated to transform healthcare.

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Someone use it as a foundation for daily or weekly discussions on the topics. That are relevant to you in the industry. They can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Alright, here we go. Let's hit some of these news stories. The first one I'm going to hit is the Amazon story. And this is a story about things move slowly until their knee.

They don't move slowly. And by the time they're not moving slowly, it's too late to react. And Amazon pharmacy. We saw coming. See, I started covering it as a story, I think three years ago when they started to get the licenses in all the major states and three years ago, you could do something about it. Today, not so sure you can.

Here's this story. Amazon pharmacy now offers same day delivery in New York city in LA area. So the introduced same-day service in those two markets, utilizing a blend of environmentally friendly delivery methods. E-bikes electric vans and drones. This service will extend it to over a dozen us cities by the end of the year. Leverages advanced technology, including generative AI to enhance the speed and accuracy of prescription processing by integrating this service. Into. Existing logistics network, which is vast Amazon aims to improve convenience for customers dealing with acute conditions by reducing prescription delivery times from days to hours. They moved, not only the move done only aims to provide faster access to medications, but also strives to improve overall health outcomes by making it more likely. For patients to adhere to or to their medication schedules. And this is one of the stories where. You have to look at big tech.

And we like to make fun of big tech, a lot in the healthcare space, but when they get it right, they get it right. And this they've gotten right. This is essentially the combination of. Ups. FedEx. CVS and Walgreens. And the ease of ordering. We always use Amazon as the example of ease of ordering.

So it's the ease of Amazon and it's bringing all those things together to the point now where if I were a health system, There's no competing with this. You have to decide where your farm is. Pharmacy is going to sit and who you're going to partner with. And allow the chips fall, where they may, this happened a long time ago back the actually, this happened back when the CVS and Walgreens put a pharmacy in every every street corner.

But this I think is also the precursor to. We used to say all healthcare is local. And this is what it looks like when it stops being a local. It still gets delivered locally, obviously. But this is what happens when it stops being local. When you can start doing tele-health across the nation in all 50 states and you, you create a much. Smoother process for people to take advantage of it.

All right. That's the Amazon story. This one cracked me up. Because it's something. That's something I've been saying for a while, which is what's the difference between, we, we love these remote work strategies. We like love these work from home strategies. But what's the big difference.

And I tell the story of my friend who went in during the pandemic, went into work every week at the coaching of people like myself and others. And received like four promotions during that time. Cause nobody else was coming to the office and invariably the executives were, and they'd walk around the office and see somebody there and naturally assume that they're the one who is working or at least they're available.

And that person got many promotions. Dell has I was telling us what. Quite frankly, I think I already knew, which is Dell has introduced a new return to office policy that discourages remote work by preventing fully remote employees from being eligible for promotions or role changes, favoring, those who opt. For a hybrid model over coming into the office at least 39 days. A quarter, this shift marks a significant change from Dallas, previous flexible. And supportive stands for remote work. It's interesting.

Cause people are going to rail on this story and real on Dell for this. But at the end of the day, this is bias. We have a bias towards when we see people, we interact with them more. We're more connected with them. When we see them in the office we. Label assumptions on them. Like they are hard workers. Because they chose to come in. I'm just saying there's a bias.

I'm not saying it's better or worse. That kind of stuff. I think there's ways to do remote work. Obviously our entire organization over here is remote work. So again, I know it's possible. I know people can do it. The culture has to catch up. So this one, us sues apple for illegal monopoly over smartphones.

This is on the verge. The us department of justice alongside 16 states and district attorneys district attorney generals. Attorneys general. Yeah. That's how you say that has filed an antitrust lawsuit against apple accusing the tech giant of maintaining an illegal monopoly in the smartphone market.

The lawsuit alleges that apple has engaged in practices that drive. Prices and restrict competition such as imposing contractual restrictions. On developers, blocking cloud streaming apps and limiting inter-operability with rival products, thus making users more reliant on Apple's ecosystem. The government seeks to compel apple to cease these practices, though it has not specified. If it would seek to break up the company, apple has responded by asserting that the lawsuit misunderstands its business. And threatens its ability to innovate indicating plans to vigorously defend against the claims this action against apple. Follows a pattern of increased scrutiny by us. Authorities on tech giants for alleged monopolistic practices. This is going to keep coming up. The it's interesting because clearly apple has created a very powerful ecosystem that we all are dependent and relying on. And one of the things I like about that ecosystem is it's fairly secure.

Now. I know there's a lot of attacks on it. I know there's a lot of vulnerabilities that show up from time to time. But the fact that apple has this walled garden creates a couple of things. One is a highly stable platform and second is I think, a secure platform. And then the third is, those who choose to play within the platform play within a certain set of rules that they dictate.

Those rules give us that security, that reliability. That interoperability between the things that we need. By opening this up, I'm not sure it makes the iPhone any better. But it might make the market better. So it's a interesting one to keep an eye on. I look at this and I just sorta throw up my hands okay, we're choosing to go after apple.

Why are we choosing to go after apple? Why don't we go after the other big tech players who have essentially created a monopoly on these cloud services that we are highly dependent on. And they have complete control of us. They can raise the prices whenever they want, and we have to respond by paying that invoice.

In fact, I just got a, I have a couple of Google accounts and I just got notices on all three of them that there are price increases and what am I going to do? Am I going to change? Are you going to change your Microsoft 365 contract? You're going to change your VMware contract, your Citrix contract here, whatever.

I mean that, there's a reality that these big tech players have an a in order. Order amount of sway. Over us, these days. Because we have adopted this this page, you go model for pricing, but we've been locked in by the technology itself. Let's see the day would not be complete without at least mentioning change healthcare.

And this story that was the top of our newsletter today is lack of transparency, handcuffed feds. Change hack response. Lawmakers say so lawmakers led by a representative. James Raskin are raising concerns over United health groups. Lack of transparency. Following the ransomware attack on a subsidiary change healthcare, which disrupted symptoms for nearly a month, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. CYSA reported being handcuffed due to insufficient information from United health group, which hindered federal response efforts.

Raskin. Has requested detailed information on the hacks impact and United health group's response. Meanwhile, the United health group is focusing on system restoration and data protection. The incident has prompted the federal investigation and. Increased scrutiny from both. The house oversight committee and Senate finance committee. And this is one of those things. Also on the area of monopoly.

You just throw up your hands and go. Why apple, why Microsoft? Why others and why not? United health group? Clearly one of the biggest monopolies going. In the United States, if not the world in terms of you just follow the processes and the money flow and whatnot, it's. It's clearly has significant monopolistic.

Pressure R control over a market. With that being said, lack of transparency. Our lesson on this is when an incident happens. Clearly there's there's things we have to take into consideration and forces that come into play. One being it is a crime scene. So you have to respond the way the FBI wants.

The second is there's going to be legal ramifications. So lawyers get involved and say, this is the information you can and cannot re release. And that kind of stuff. And so when you're sitting back reading this article and saying, lack of transparency it's really hard to tell whether they did have a lack of transparency or not.

I know I talked to a lot of CEOs and they were just craving information that they were not getting. And it could be that United health group and change did not have that information to give it could be that they were not forthcoming with that information. It could be any number of things they could be.

They were told not to share that information. It could be any number of things, but the the moral of the story for us is in as much as it depends on us during these events. We should share as much information as we possibly can. That is the that's the moral of that story. In every case.

So there you have it, Amazon remote work, apple and change healthcare. That's all for today. Don't forget to share this podcast with a friend or colleague, by the way. Probably won't do a show on Friday. I will do one on Thursday, but not on Friday. Friday's a holiday for us at this week else. So won't be doing one then.

And you'll hear back from me next Monday and Tuesday. We want to thank our channels sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Notable service. Now interprise health parlance, certified health and 📍 Panda health. Check them out at this week. health.com/today. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.