Disclosures

Independence

Health Policy Signal is a personal publication. It is written, operated and paid for by Matt Reid in a personal capacity.

Matt Reid works on federal health policy at the American Medical Association. Health Policy Signal is not affiliated with, funded by, endorsed by, reviewed by, or published on behalf of the AMA or any other organization. Nothing on this site is an AMA position, an AMA comment, or an AMA statement, and nothing here should be attributed to the AMA or to any employer, client or coalition. All views are his own.

Posts here describe what federal rules do to physicians, practices, health IT developers and patients. That is a description of the policy and its likely effects. It is not an advocacy position taken on anyone's behalf, and no post should be read as one.

How these briefs are produced

Health Policy Signal is automated. Briefs are selected, drafted and published by software, without individual human review before publication. That is stated plainly because it changes how you should read them.

Each weekday the pipeline:

• monitors the Federal Register, Congress.gov, OIRA's pending review list, and agency feeds including CMS and ONC
• selects items against a defined health IT and physician-policy scope, and skips days when nothing clears it
• drafts the brief using a large language model
• runs automated checks, and refuses to publish anything that fails them

The checks that gate publication:

• Every URL in a brief must appear in the source material the pipeline actually retrieved. A citation the model invented is rejected and the brief does not go out.
• Sections that are empty, too thin, or truncated in transit are rejected.
• Unrendered markup and placeholder text are rejected.
• Language written for an internal audience rather than for readers is rejected.

The regulatory tracker is regenerated every weekday morning and carries a visible timestamp showing when it last ran.

What that means for you

The citations are machine-verified against retrieved source documents, which is a stronger guarantee than most commentary offers. The analysis around them is machine-written and is not read by a person before it publishes.

So: treat the linked primary source as the authority, and this publication's characterization of it as a starting point rather than a substitute for reading the document.

Not advice

Nothing here is legal, compliance, or regulatory advice, and this site is not a compliance authority. Comment deadlines move, agencies issue corrections, and automated systems make mistakes. Verify any date you intend to rely on against the primary document linked in the post.

Corrections

Errors get fixed. Write to [email protected].

A substantive correction is made in the post itself with a dated note saying what changed. A post that cannot be corrected is withdrawn rather than quietly edited. Because publication is automated, the most useful thing you can send is the URL of the post and the primary source it got wrong.