Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Data vs. Goliath

A new regulation in the US forced insurance companies to publishtheir data about their negotiated rates. Alec Stein, writing on the blog DoltHub, points to an obvious problem—the data dump was so massive that it’s currently unusable:

The data runs into the petabyte range, dwarfing the Library of Congress, the LibGen catalog, the full uncompressed English Wikipedia, and the entire HD Netflix Catalog – combined…To scrape the data you'll need to be sure to have a business-level fiber-optic connection that can handle 400Mbps, tens of thousands of dollars of disk space, and compute time to wrangle 90GB JSON blobs.

But Stein sees a path forward. In a huff of technocratic optimism, he outlines a few strategies to begin to make sense of “the trillion hospital prices.” Stay tuned to see if the promise unfolds.

2. Ohio Semiconductors and Pharma

The big news out of Ohio doesn’t involve Buckeye football. Intel is breaking ground on a semiconductor manufacturing facility to increase chipmaking on US soil. With President Biden in attendance, the fanfare signals a new era of government investment in private-sector R&D and manufacturing. While technology and green energy lead the conversation, health and pharmaceuticals are right behind. The Economist reports:

Industrial policy—an attempt by the government to cultivate strategically important sectors—has typically been seen as anathema by political and economic leaders in America in recent decades. With the notable exception of defense production, they have frowned on state involvement in business as counterproductive…But views have been evolving fast, partly as a response to China’s economic model. Many in Washington now think that a more muscular industrial policy is essential to vouchsafing America’s future vitality.

In an ironic twist, the Biden administration is using the success of Operation Warp Speed to support the strategy.

3. “Until More People Learn That It Exists”

Richard Woodward is an art critic in New York. He’s also dying of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a disease that “most people have never heard of” but “claims more lives [in the US] than prostate cancer and nearly as many as breast cancer.” As Woodward reflectson his deadly condition, he offers an observation about how and why we pay attention to the diseases that we do:

The discouraging lack of progress in finding a cure for such an ancient disease may explain the relative silence about IPF. Journalists throng to report on any illness when science advances understanding of it, and there hasn’t been a lot of promising news to report on this front…This is a disease that badly needs a respected public figure to advocate for more research funding. The powerful tools of the medical-industrial complex can’t be trained on solving the riddle of IPF until more people learn that it exists.

4. The Early Days of 988

After the summer launch of the “988” mental health crisis line in the US, some early results are in:

In August – the first full month that 988 was operational — the Lifeline saw a 45% increase in overall volume of calls, texts and chats compared to August 2021. The number of calls answered went up from 141,400 to 216,000 – a more than 50% increase. And texts answered went up by a whopping 1,000% – from 3,400 in August, 2021, to 39,900 in August of this year.

But can supply meet demand?

"There's going to be massive disparities across the states," says [Ben Miller, a mental health advocate]. While the 988 Lifeline is accessible nationally, with a national network of call centers, it essentially functions as a state-run system. And states vary vastly in how much they have invested in the former 10-digit Lifeline and associated services.

5. Post-Traumatic Spit

Israeli researchers share in Molecular Psychology that they have discovered a “microbial signature” in veterans’ saliva that may help diagnose PTSD. If true, saliva may become a powerful diagnostic tool for mental illness:

Until now, post-trauma diagnosis has been based solely on psychological and psychiatric measures. Thanks to this study, it may be possible, in the future, to use objective molecular and biological characteristics to distinguish PSTD sufferers.