Live Demo: Building Your Family Health Dashboard with Claude - Weekly Livestream w/Gene Vestel FHIR Data Guy

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 Few WordsI explained that walking into HIMSS when you’re building for System C is like walking into the Home Depot when you’re trying to build something that doesn’t exist yet.Everyone around you is very excited about their specific product. The pipes. The fixtures. The smart home integration. BUT they’re building it for the architecture that exists today. Which is impressive to most. And also completely beside the point if you’re trying to build something the current blueprints can’t accommodate. Gene added, “We’ve got the pipes kind of connected. They’re not 100% connected. It’s like we’re all on this street, living in different houses - one house doesn’t have hot water, another doesn’t have a sink. And nobody’s even designed the blueprints yet.” To which I counter, the blueprints are still being designed on old architecture because the incumbents don’t want to risk diverting the flow elsewhere when the new infrastructure comes online.Within a System B lens, there are “cool” things happening - Gene mentioned Databricks going all-in on AI ecosystem building, the first payer (shoutout to our friend Andrew Toy, CEO at Clover Health) who in typical Andrew style surprised the industry by being the first health plan to actually share data under CMS Aligned Networks. You’ll be seeing me mention him alot more over the coming weeks because I have an unreleased recording with him from last year that is beyond relevant now. Plus, Uni and Wilson were involved on that front so they will write about him too.Brendan Keeler and the HTD crew was in the house (sadly sans Pryce) HIMSS is their total wheelhouse. They were there doing what they always do, which is quietly (and in Brendan’s case, loudly) moving the whole interoperability conversation forward. And Gene mentioned his buddy Jason Coltonga at Fasten Health - one of the first healthcare companies to integrate with Claude - is connecting clinical records in ways that felt impossible a few years ago.I was lucky enough to find a few focused minutes with Priyanka Agarwal, one of the founders of HealthEx, who is stealthily building the pipes for System C by giving consumers license with their own health data. We’ve written about HealthEx before.The pipes exist. The standards exist. And yet most patients are still completely on their own trying to put it together - and the people who built the pipes aren’t exactly rushing to hand out the blueprints. For good reason.HIMSS looks like it does pretty much every year, I even went and checked for the 10 minutes I had before running to catch my plane. Quite frankly, it’s why I don’t go to HIMSS and only went because I had an invite to a Most Interesting Person Black Tie that was a sidecar since so many people were at HIMSS. For me, it’s not the big health systems redesigning themselves. It’s not the payers deciding to play nice with patient data out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s the convergence of two things happening simultaneously: AI making information instantly and personally actionable, and a generation of patients who have simply run out of patience with a system that’s been charging them for opacity.The moat of incumbent healthcare isn’t impenetrable anymore. David Banks, CEO of Advent Health, one of the biggest health systems in the country even said it on stage. I’ll publish that soon, don’t worry. Healthcare, while amazing at keeping us alive, vital for acute care needs, has become the medieval overlord. The one who’s been collecting taxes on the peasants for decades - and could, because the system was opaque enough to keep them confused and disempowered. One that is suddenly facing a situation where the peasants have the same information he does.AI is the equalizer. Not because it’s magic. Because it removes the information asymmetry that was the entire basis of the power structure.As Far As Tuesday GoesCarter and I have both done versions of this on our own. I’ve shown mine on livestream, Carter’s done it with Claude CLI in ways that frankly still make my brain hurt a little. But Gene is the first person we’ve found who has done this at a level with an eye towards making it accessible and safe, and who has the deep interoperability chops to explain why the data is structured the way it is and what you can actually unlock with it.Carter’s framing, which I love: “This is about agency. Not about becoming your own doctor. About becoming a more effective consumer of your health span.”The distinction matters. Diagnosing yourself is not the point. Understanding your own longitudinal picture - what’s been happening to your body, what it’s cost you, what the signals are - and being able to walk into any healthcare encounter with that context loaded and ready? That’s the point.Come with your questions. Come with whatever bill confused you. Come with the thing your doctor never had time to explain. Get full access to Food is Health at foodishealth.substack.com/subscribe