Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

I'm Dan from Mac. On today's show, an entire country plans to ban iPhones, and the latest in Elon Musk's kind of sort of quest to acquire Tesla.

The first, using technology to make healthcare cheaper, or at least to make it work a bit better.

Yesterday in Washington, there was something called the Blue Button Conference, which was

organized by federal health care regulators and attended by representatives of big tech

companies like Amazon and Google.

The idea was to figure out how the public and private sectors

can work together on improving what's known as healthcare interoperability. So in layman's terms,

this basically means letting you share your full medical record with different providers. It sounds

pretty simple and obvious, but as you know, if you've ever tried to do it, it just doesn't

happen very much. Some of the challenge is kind of ancient technology that's barely better than paper files, really old spreadsheets. And some of it's the tech

companies and some health care providers feels better for business to not share data, because they

view the data as extremely valuable. And then on top of that are all the privacy rules and regulations.

The bottom line here is that tech companies keep moving

into health care, both software companies and hardware companies. But a lot of what they're doing

is treating symptoms rather than the underlying system disease. And it may take government to

push everyone in the right direction, because profits and patients don't always have the same goal

in mind. So let's go deeper on this with Sima Verma, administrator for the centers of Medicare

and Medicaid Services, which organized the Blue Button conference yesterday, and Sima was the keynote

speaker.

We're joined by Sima Verma, administrator for the centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services,

which organized and she keynoted the Blue Button conference yesterday.

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