Brittany Trang, Ph.D., covers AI in health and medicine: Does it actually work? Who benefits, or might be harmed? She writes the weekly AI Prognosis newsletter. Follow her on Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. You can reach Brittany on Signal at btrang.01.

It was a skit worthy of an Agatha Christie whodunit reveal: Against the perhaps-too-joyous strains of a jazzy “When The Saints Go Marching In,” a gaggle of health IT professionals and Medicare staffers accompanied a Spirit Halloween-style coffin prop onstage at Health and Human Services headquarters on Monday. Some wore black veils, some held white roses. 

The coffin read, “RIP CLIPBOARD,” referring to the decades-old information-gathering staple of health care provider waiting rooms.

“So who killed the clipboard?” asked Zac Jiwa, a federal Medicare official. Health IT officials and experts, reading from cue cards, denied that it was standards implementation, health information exchange networks, electronic health records, or apps — all parts of the various health data initiatives that private industry promised Medicare a year ago that it would improve.