The Pitt, Scrubs, and Why Hollywood Gets Your EHR Nightmare Right
Written by Dr Nick on April 6, 2026
This month’s episode of “News You Can Use” on HealthcareNOWRadio features news from the month of March 2026
News You Can Use with your Hosts Dr Craig Joseph and Dr Nick van Terheyden
The show that gives you a quick insight into the latest news, twists, turns, and debacles going on in healthcare with my friend and co-host Craig Joseph, MD (@CraigJoseph), Chief Medical Officer at Nordic Consulting Partners, and myself, where every diagnosis comes with a side of humor. We hope you stay curious, stay engaged, and keep seeking the truth in healthcare in a world that thrives on information.
Buckle up as we dive into the ER of excitement, the ICU of irrationality, and the waiting room of wacky wisdom in this month’s show that features a review of:
- HIMSS
- AI and Commoditization
- Claude Skills
- Social Media Health Imapcts
- The Pitt
This month with Dr Craig just back from HIMMS, we are here to save you seeking out further infomration and insights: it’s AI all the way down. Every single booth had “now featuring AI” slapped on like a last-minute sticker job. And honestly we are both excited and terrified. The ambient listening tools that record your doctor’s visit and auto-generate notes? Pretty cool. The fact that every vendor is suddenly an “AI company” when three months ago they were selling glorified apps and spreadsheets? But as Craig said here’s the real conversation nobody’s having at these conferences. Why are hospitals paying top dollar for third-party AI when the base models from OpenAI, Google, and Claude are getting scary good, scary fast? Give it 18 months before some health system CEO/CFO/CMO/CMIO says “wait, why are we spending millions on this again?”
Speaking of Claude, Craig offers his insights into his switch from ChatGPT, and the new “skills” feature is a game-changer. Uploading his entire library and content, including all his blog posts from the last five years, and now he claims to have his very own personalized writing assistant that tells me when he is being repetitive (spoiler: often) or suggests connections your Social Media sozzled brain missed entirely. Claude is his intern, not a colleague but is getting better and, importantly learning all the time. As part of this discussion, we dive into car maintenance and discover that the car warning lights are not always clear, and as I discovered, this resulted in an engine fire. Just a thought but perhaps don’t be that guy or gal! Use AI for what it’s good at, but keep your critical thinking cap on.
Finally, we talk about how social media is literally giving people hemorrhoids. Seriously, Health Affairs published data showing 210 million people worldwide meet the criteria for “problematic internet use (“Digital Addiction Is A Public Health Problem. Is Public Health Law The Solution?”) but for near term effects we refer you to the PLOS article “Smartphone use on the toilet and the risk of hemorrhoids.” I tis noteable that Australia banned social media for under-16s, and the kids are actually thanking them. And now we have lawsuits proving these platforms were designed to be addictive. The takeaway? Touch grass, delete TikTok, and stop taking your phone into the bathroom. Oh, and watch The Pitt and Scrubs reboot but where despite being Hollywood productions things are pretty real.
We hope you enjoy our take on the latest news and developments in healthcare and want to help you keep untangling the web of information, dodging the sensational pitfalls, and emerging victorious, albeit a little dizzy, on the other side. In the end, the stories we uncover, and the discussions we ignite, all shape the narrative of our shared future. We want to hear from you especially if you have topics covered or questions you’d like answered. You can reach out directly via the contact form on my website, or send a message on LinkedIn to Craig or me.
Until next time keep solving healthcare’s mysteries before they become your emergencies and stay healthy, stay skeptical, and for heaven’s sake—check who’s listed as your emergency contact.
Listen live at 4:00 AM, 12:00 Noon or 8:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday for the next week at HealthcareNOW Radio. After that, you can listen on demand (See podcast information below.) Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheIncrementalist.
Listen along on HealthcareNowRadio or on SoundCloud
Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden
Welcome to the month of March. I’m Dr Nick and I’m Dr Craig. This week, we’ll be dissecting the latest healthcare news, unraveling the twists and turns and making sense of the debacles we see every day.
Craig Joseph
Just remember, life’s a lot like a breaking news story, unpredictable, often absurd, and occasionally leaves you wondering if it’s all just a cosmic prank.
Nick van Terheyden
This week, we take a look at AI and commoditization and the pit if you know what that is,
Craig Joseph
and we dive into social media impacts for healthcare and some
Nick van Terheyden
Claude skills. But first off, this week, we’re going to review HIMS. And I know it was a little bit of time ago, but this is our first opportunity. We have a reporter on site ready to give us the full download.
Craig Joseph
I am very excited to hear from that reporter. Who do we I’m looking around. Who do we have? Oh, my God, Nick It’s Oh, is it me? It’s me. Oh, we should.
Nick van Terheyden
I know it’s elevating your status to a reporter. There we go. We should.
Craig Joseph
We should have feel good about that. I Well, I’m
Nick van Terheyden
getting you some White House credentials, if you like.
Craig Joseph
I was thinking more DOD, but that’s fine. That’s fine. Get to the Pentagon with Laura Loomer, but I digress. Hymns. So health information. I forgot what it’s called. What does it stand for? Management and soap, something?
Nick van Terheyden
Systems. We ask you to tell us how to how to spell out HIPAA and get it right. But I got that wrong at some competition, somewhere in some healthcare thing, and I was given a very hard time for
Craig Joseph
that. I think there’s two ways in
Nick van Terheyden
HIPAA, I can never remember, patient portability, I don’t know whatever anyway, health information management system, society, I do.
Craig Joseph
There you go. There you go. That’s awesome. Yes, annual meeting for healthcare and technology, people who are interested in buying it and people who are selling it. And it was a good meeting. Like, was
Nick van Terheyden
there anybody there buying? Wasn’t it just all sellers
Craig Joseph
or just tall it was just all vendors talking to other vendors.
Nick van Terheyden
We have seen a fair amount of that. Let’s,
Craig Joseph
I mean, that’s not,
Nick van Terheyden
I think the one in the covid pandemic was definitely
Craig Joseph
like that. I remember that. Well, you know, I kind of have a foot in both in both sides, right? So I guess I’m a vendor. I’m definitely a vendor, yeah, but also a physician. So it’s, it’s kind of weird. There were Yes, so there were actual providers there. We’ll call them buyers, but people interested in, in, you know, learning about what’s the latest and greatest. I’m gonna tell you what it is, and you might want to sit down.
Nick van Terheyden
Okay, are you sitting? I’m sitting. Ai. Oh, my God, strike me down with a feather. Yeah, it’s hard to AI. Of all variations, themes, ideas, uses and UN uses.
Craig Joseph
Everyone’s doing AI, and even if they weren’t doing it before, they’re doing it now. And so you could, you could see the the booth being kind of redone to make sure.
Nick van Terheyden
Did you see any boost with a sticker that had clearly been added afterwards with AI, yeah, yeah,
Craig Joseph
now featuring AI, oh, my god, yeah, yeah.
Nick van Terheyden
We’ve seen this cycle a few more times, or in the past with, you know, other terms and yeah, Meaningful Use is the one I remember. Oh, yeah, meaningful use certified.
Craig Joseph
Yeah, there’s, there’s some, there’s some, some catch words that I have kind of been bandied about, but, you know, I mean, I think AI is, is the real deal. It’s just everyone has to now claim that they have it, and if they don’t claim that, then they’re behind. Whether or not it’s really anything remains to be seen meaning with their product, right? AI is most certainly changing healthcare. The question for me is the these base models that are coming out from open AI and from Google and from, I want to say Claude, but who’s the Claude manufacturer?
Nick van Terheyden
I lost track of all of that. I’m blanking out somebody else will
Craig Joseph
fanthropic. No,
Nick van Terheyden
I thought Facebook well. And then there’s grok as well.
Craig Joseph
That’s, yeah, it’s a different thing altogether. So there’s these, there’s these, these models that are really good, and they’re getting better almost by the day. Certainly. By the by the month, and so it’s it continues to concern me, for the people that work for some of these companies, that they’re gonna have a hard time making a case that they’re so much better than the stuff that I can just get with some you know, series with some prompting and a little bit of work, that that the difference between that out of the box and the stuff that they’re doing, it has to be so great to justify the cost and and so far, I’m not sure
Nick van Terheyden
that it is so i Well, tell me what you use. I mean, are you using? Well, not so much you, but your clients, that the folks that you talk to, are they still paying for this? They are,
Craig Joseph
they are, they are. So, you know, the big thing for you know right now, which is, is ambient listening, right? So what that means is that the doctor generally turns on their phone and the conversation that’s happening in the office, is in the in the exam room, is being recorded, hopefully, with permission of the patient that’s sitting there, which ones on the state
Nick van Terheyden
you’re in, whether that’s required or not. Maybe it’s different in healthcare, I’m not sure,
Craig Joseph
but I don’t know if it’s if it’s required, whether or not it’s required, it’s a good idea, not what you’re saying is being recorded, right? And it’s going up, and then it’s generating, for the physician, a progress note, so a summary of what was said, and in a meaningful way, putting it in a good order. It also can queue up orders. And so if I were to say, Oh, we’re going to give little Johnny his four year vaccines, which is a DTaP and an MMR and an IPv, it can queue up those orders for me. So I don’t have to actually go and find them. It doesn’t make them. It doesn’t make it happen. I still have to take a step and review it, but it can be very helpful. And I don’t think anyone’s ready yet to kind of use some make their own type of AI for for the for that yet, yet, but the improvements are getting there. And so we know that that hospitals and healthcare systems are so conservative that they they would rather at this point, and I don’t think they have much of a choice pay a third party vendor to create all of that. But I can’t imagine in the next I can imagine in the next year or two, someone saying, you know, we could, we could
Nick van Terheyden
pay, why are we paying all this money when we could actually have it outside and in fact, I saw something just recently. I forget which health system it was. They were using. A bunch of the tool set that were has been now included, shipped with the epic universe to essentially test out. I think it was pharmacology, and, you know, some of the challenges of building was it? I think it was complex prescriptions for probably cancer chemotherapy. I don’t recall, but you know, that’s exactly what they were doing, was using the existing tool set that is included. Doesn’t mean say you’re not paying for it. I bristle when people say it’s free, because there ain’t nothing free, at least nothing I’ve discovered as yet. So it’s no I agree with you. I think, who, who can’t. And to be clear, I mean, I’ve certainly done some of this. I’ve, I’ve extended my skill set, and I’ve, I will call myself a programmer again based on congratulations. I I’ve, I’ve revitalized my skills. But let’s be clear, I’m using the technology that just extended me in a way that I went, Oh, my God, that’s really close.
Craig Joseph
It’s, yeah, it’s becoming available to the normal person and to you, and to you as well. Dr, oh,
Nick van Terheyden
thank you very much. That’s too general. I mean, let’s talk a little bit about Claude, and, you know, some of those, I mean, those are essentially, there’s a whole tool set that you can it’s, I don’t want to say it’s a market. I haven’t stepped into this, but I have a sense that you have stepped into it. I’ve essentially done my own thing, but I don’t have any of the paid subscriptions, and I don’t think I can create this Claude instance to automate things, but you have, or you are, or you’re doing
Craig Joseph
well, I’m a subscriber, so I actually moved from open AI chat, GPT to anthropic
Nick van Terheyden
recommendation folks here, That’s,
Craig Joseph
I speak only from personal experience. Interesting. I thought I was getting a better experience with with Claude than I was
Nick van Terheyden
with check. Was the price different, or is it the same?
Craig Joseph
Nope, yeah, it’s the exact same for the for the basic level. So I’m at the lowest level you can pay for, which is
Nick van Terheyden
20 a month. No, you’re not well.
Craig Joseph
I. Pay for, I said the lowest level you can pay for Dr
Nick van Terheyden
Nick, well, pay for the free vote.
Craig Joseph
Yeah, you pay me for that. Yeah. So they, I really, I made the move when they introduce what they call Claude co work and and again, this is all kind of for personal use. I don’t, I don’t use it for anything work related. Well, give
Nick van Terheyden
us an example for personal use, if you don’t mind, yeah, yeah.
Craig Joseph
So I’ll tell you, I write blog posts, and I do that every two or three weeks. I went out and and so I have now created a skill. So skills are kind of like, I think, probably the future of programs where you you train the AI model to work on something very specific for you. So in this case, I’ve uploaded, so I co wrote a book several years ago. So I’ve uploaded the PDF of that, and I’ve uploaded all of my blog posts for like, the last four or five years. And I said, Hey, Claude, read through this. And, you know, get do a lot of fun things. So one fun thing might be, if I come up with an idea for a blog post it, I’m going to send it. Before I really do any work on it. I’m going to send it into Claude and say, Hey, how does this does this look repetitive? Right, to something I’ve
already done clever or,
Craig Joseph
Oh no, this is new, but is there something that I’ve written in the past that I should reference?
Nick van Terheyden
Yep, right? Because you can’t remember it
Craig Joseph
all, because I don’t remember it, or it can, and it can also do things like it can kind of identify, you know, not maybe transitions or references that I wouldn’t have put together, and say, Well, you know, this is kind of like when you wrote blah, like, oh, wow, I hadn’t thought about that. But you’re right. It is like that. And so helping me to make my my writing better, I cannot. I haven’t used it for this, but I’m gonna be, hey, Claude, what’s going on in the news or, right? Yeah, find some ideas.
Nick van Terheyden
It’s like, it’s like having a colleague that you can talk to. And, I mean, I’ve heard a lot of people using it for those kind of tools, absolutely, but it’s right,
Craig Joseph
you know, it’s one of those things where I wouldn’t call it a colleague, what I would call it is a, you know, I think it’s best to think of it as like an intern or an assistant. Okay, who’s, you know, do I trust you 100% with my life? No, right? No. So I’m sophisticated enough with the questions that I’m asking it that I can judge its answers, and I can be like, Oh, no, you’re way off on that. I will totally ignore that piece of advice. Versus if I asked it like I know nothing about how my car works, like, I know there’s an engine and it has some kind of lubrication in it and it’s got oil and I’ve got to put but that’s about all I know. So if I asked Claude a question, and it said, Well, you should, you know, do this. I have no way of judging whether that’s a good idea or not, because I have no knowledge in that area, so I wouldn’t trust
Nick van Terheyden
it for that. I mean, just to be clear, and I was a car guy, and I did all this kind of stuff in the days when you actually could, and I carried a toolkit in my What do you guys call it? I call it the boot trunk. We call it a trunk trunk. There we go. I would it was not unusual in a cold, wet morning in the United Kingdom to find me underneath messing around with starter motors and whatever on my way to work. I would factor this in or not, but, but I actually think Claude skills might be useful in today’s day and age of car maintenance, because it’s plugged into the OBD and say, Oh, what’s the error code? Okay, this is the fix, right?
Craig Joseph
I mean, I have actually asked Claude like, Hey, I got this, this light, you know, this light alert that popped up? What? What might it? Oh, my God,
Nick van Terheyden
if people could see me, they’d see me shaking my head. I mean, I’m just You should be ashamed of yourself. Oh, there’s a light. I don’t know what that one means.
Craig Joseph
I’m gonna ask Claude $100 for the same answer, yes.
Nick van Terheyden
Do not drive. Do not pass. Go. Cease driving immediately. Dad belting along at 70 miles at all. That’s interesting. Has that light always
Craig Joseph
been there? I’m not asking Claude questions at 70 miles per hour. No, I know,
Nick van Terheyden
but maybe you should be, because some of these lights are serious. Yeah. Look, I say all of this because these kind of things have happened to me. I’ve had a light come on, and, you know, it turns out it was a pretty serious light, because as I carried on, the engine caught fire. No, and we don’t recommend that. No, no, absolutely not. Well, my version of this is. Is, albeit on in free but it’s, it’s a very specific use case. It’s all about extracting data from a standard format. But it’s not anything that does exist that I want to get out flight details from a regular piece of content to say, here are all the flights and it needs to be in this format to be imported into open flight so that I can track all of the flights. And I went through multiple cycles and learned all of this programming from JSON, which is the structure and Python to create all of these form. It was extraordinary. And I ultimately have this really cool application that runs in a web page. I paste in the content, it produces the flights and allows me to download the CSV that I can upload into open flights, and I could probably automate it’s just wow. This is a old school COBOL programmer with JCL. So that was a big step for me. I’m just saying, so, yeah,
Craig Joseph
well, the key with a skill. I’ll just end with this, because I’ve taken some, I’m gonna say air quotes, classes, meaning I’ve, you know, you’ve been on YouTube. I’ve watched some. Well, I actually paid for, like, oh, wow, yeah, I’m kind of a big deal.
Nick van Terheyden
So, yeah, I mean, spend money Exactly, exactly.
Craig Joseph
The key is, with all with, especially with Claude, is that it learns a skill, but you have to kind of keep updating that skill. So when it, when you ask it for something and say, Hey, using that, you know, use this skill. Tell me if this is a good piece of content that I’m thinking about writing, and if it makes a big mistake, like, oh, you would never want to repeat this. Like, oh, actually, no, Claude, that’s not what I’m saying. You can write and then it improves that skill, right? And so that’s the key, is you have to kind of constantly give it feedback, like, oh, I want more like this, less like that. And it incorporates this into what looked like English words. I mean, they’re just words that you can read, and you can edit yourself if you want. But I just have Claude edited for me and just say, like, No, I don’t. I didn’t mean this. What I meant was that update your skill so that you don’t make this mistake again, and that way the skill gets better, so that the next time I ask it, we’re not running through the exact same problem, right? And that skill only works for for me. You no one else sees it.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, very neat. All right, moving on. I think exciting times. And you know, if I have one piece of guidance, it’s explore or test out you should really, there’s so much that you can potentially do, even with the free version, which, you know, I’m there. So we saw an interesting piece in Health Affairs, I think, talking about the problematic nature of social media. What was, what was that about? What did you see? Well, it
Craig Joseph
was a it was an editorial that I, that I kind of found in Health Affairs. And it, it basically, kind of pointed out that millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world, I think there was an estimate of 210 million, which seems like a lot of people globally, not just in the US, but globally, meet the criteria for this, something called problematic internet use, right? And so I don’t have the criteria in front of me, but one can imagine, it’s, it’s, you know,
Nick van Terheyden
DSM and,
Craig Joseph
well, my estimation, I think you’re right. That’s where it’s heading. It’s going to be a, kind of an official diagnosis that insurance will pay for. But it’s, you know, it’s the kind of, it’s kind of like the real deal. It’s not just an opinion. Now, like there’s some, there’s research and evidence to support the fact that, hey, this really affects your activities of daily living. It can affect your job. It can affect your ability to do well in school, and especially if you’re spending too much time, not only on social media, but with technology in general, it can make certain things worse, like anxiety and other types of behavioral health issues, depression and loneliness, all of those things
Nick van Terheyden
can be I have one to add that was recently published. If definitively, over 50% increase or more higher a 50% increase in incidence of hemorrhoids.
Craig Joseph
Ah, yes, I think I did read that. Did you read that one? Yes, people are spending time on the toilet and not getting off the toilet because they’re engaged with their phones, which is, I mean, it’s, I don’t even want to go down that path. I don’t want to go down that path. Oh, please, let me try and get us
Nick van Terheyden
back to health affairs. Oh, come on. This is just the replacement for the magazine. Scene rack that used to be in everything that’s accurate, but
Craig Joseph
that is accurate, that is accurate. And
Nick van Terheyden
it was clearly always the guys, because I never saw any magazines that you go, Oh, you know, I can’t think of, you know, fashion daily, or whatever it happened to be that women might read. It was always mechanics, like auto daily. And I
Craig Joseph
always put Health Affairs. Dr Nick, I put Health Affairs in my bathroom. Is what you mean. If you’re going to go to the bathroom, you’re going to get educated. God damn right. That’s, that’s my attitude. Well, this article was basically saying, Hey, this is a public health problem, and we should treat it as as such. It is,
Nick van Terheyden
drag it into the sewer. Sorry. It was. It really tickled my, my funny bone, as you can tell. But not to diminish you’re, you’re making an exceedingly important point, unusually, so I’ll try it is. It’s awful. I mean, it impacts mental health. It drags. I mean, and I would say, notice that Australia has banned it for under sixteens, I think, you know, and there’s, there was war over it. But I’ve seen subject subsequent articles talking to some of the kids who’ve said, this is fantastic. Yep, which, wow. And you know now other countries considering it and and we’ve seen a couple of lawsuits that have actually been successfully filed and won, albeit they’ll be under appeal, saying you guys knew this stuff. You created addictive platforms designed to suck people in and have destroyed their mental health. So I’m in. But anyway, before we run out of time, we should talk at least a little bit about the pit. You know, contextually, I enjoy it. I know you do. I know a lot of well, actually, I know a lot of physicians who don’t I know some who can’t watch it because it triggers them too much. But I think it triggers because it’s so they do a really good job of realism. So much more than the ER from the originals that. Well, that was my era. I know there was stuff before that. What did you see that was really striking?
Craig Joseph
Well, you know, not giving away.
Nick van Terheyden
Oh, wait, wait, wait, spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. If you don’t want to know, if you haven’t seen it, he’s going to blow the information from the thing.
Craig Joseph
So Well, I am, to some extent, I’m just going to say that they have a problem with their electronic health record. That’s it.
Nick van Terheyden
That is realism, right there. And is this day
Craig Joseph
to day, minute to minute. The problem was they couldn’t use it, right? They had to go back to paper.
Nick van Terheyden
Oh, I bet that was shocking,
Craig Joseph
right? Shocking.
Nick van Terheyden
Did they have the paper? Did the did the young interns and PGY ones and twos even know how to use paper.
Craig Joseph
They were trained very quickly, which, you know, in my experience, the one of the groups that really knows how to use, how to kind of go to paper when they when the system goes down, is, there’s two groups. One is the people that work nights, because that’s always, huh, people that work nights, because whenever we have a planned downtime, oh, that’s when it’s always, it’s always going to be at night, because that’s when it’s the the least disruptive. It’s still disruptive, but it’s the least disruptive at night. So we have, we always do tonight. So people who who only work nights are pretty good at when the EHR goes down for a couple of hours, they don’t panic. And the emergency department again, because people are often working all kinds of different shifts. And again, when it goes down at night on a planned way that’s not frequent, once a year, twice a year, maybe. But when it happens, they don’t generally freak about it in the ER, but yeah, it did happen on on the pit, and I thought it was, it was accurate. It was an accurate display of the appropriate amount of
Nick van Terheyden
paranoia and panic. Yes, my, my, my selection for appropriate amount of reality was the poor gentleman who had a diabetic ketoacidosis, or, I don’t even recall if it was, it was probably hyper, uncontrolled. And of course, it turns out he’s not taking all his insulin because he can’t afford it. They lost their insurance because the people that were employing him changed or stopped offering it. And you know, they’ve even gone down and got, I don’t know who they brought down, probably from accounting or something, to say, hey, what can we do to help? And the conversation was a bit, it was a bit stunted in its interaction, but it essentially covered the details, which was, hey, they earned too much money to get, you know, the free. Version, but the costly version is too expensive, and I it was, you know, yep, that’s reality. The only problem I have with this is that, let’s be clear, this is Hollywood. Are people really paying attention to that piece? It wasn’t terribly exciting. I mean, it was to maybe you, and I certainly to me. I mean, that’s great, but I love what they’re doing. And, you know, shout out to scrubs 2026 because they’ve brought themselves up into the into the latest and greatest. And, you know, love a bit of comedy around that. It was quite it was very black in terms of its approach to humor. In the first season, it’s maybe toned down a little, and they’re sort of addressing some of that. But anyway, unfortunately, as usual, we find ourselves at the end of yet another episode of Exploring Healthcare’s mysteries before they became your emergencies. Until next time, I’m Dr Nick
Craig Joseph
and I’m Dr Craig and.
