Brittany Trang

@brittanytrang.com

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Health tech / AI reporter @ STAT News AAAS MMF '21 PFAS PhD/water nerd Buckeye/believer/sad indie rock concertgoer Signal: btrang.01

Song of the Week: “Still Want to Be Here” by Frightened Rabbit Ten years ago today, Scottish indie rock band Frightened Rabbit released what would become its final album. No one was better at putting into words the complicated confluence of desire and dread than lead singer Scott Hutchison. That shines through on “Still Want to Be Here:” “I still want to be here, want to be here / And I would live in a devil’s ditch just to be near you.” Hutchison died in May 2018, succumbing to the dark thoughts he often sang about struggling with.
Asian woman with glasses in a blue surgical mask takes a selfie, smiling. She is outdoors at golden hour on the sidewalk of a college campus.
As STAT’s friendly neighborhood PhD chemist, I am here to remind you that everything is chemicals no matter where it comes from. “Natural” vanilla includes vanillin made from tree pulp waste, and just because a dye is “natural” doesn’t mean it’s necessarily squeezed from the teat of a beet. The FDA’s new working definition of “natural” dyes includes dyes that are manufactured via fermentation from yeast, algae, or fungi; mixed or reacted with other chemicals, or extracted from plants bred to maximize color production. —Brittany Trang
“I’m befuddled why this is not a medical device and why folks believe that ‘medical device’ and ‘practice of medicine’ are mutually exclusive,” said Ateev Mehrotra, a physician and professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University School of Public Health.
Screenshot reading: Science Journalism Fellowships and Internships This is a non-exhaustive list of science journalism / science communications internships and fellowships one might reasonably apply to with minimal formal experience (e.g., as a student) or with one fellowship (e.g., the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship) and some freelancing under one’s belt. Science journalism fellowships AAAS Mass Media Fellowship Summer internship (June – August) for STEM undergrad students, grad students, postdocs, residents, deadline Jan 1 Based at sites around the country Nature News Two 6-month internships: Jan – June (deadline in October), July – Dec
Screenshot reading: ‘AI make number go up’ is going to be big this year If you’ve heard me say it once, you’ve heard me say it a million times: AI in health care is going to make costs go up, not down. Everybody is saying it now: In JAMA Health Forum, in NPJ Digital Medicine. HealthcareIT News reported that Intermountain got a seven-figure reimbursement boost in the first year of using Solventum’s AI clinical documentation integrity solution. Healthcare Finance reported that Baylor Scott and White Health expect to make an extra $42 million in net revenue after one year of using Accuity’s AI CDI and coding review tech, based on their data after six months. and a sidebar for a story that says: Related Story AI scribe companies promise to help doctors bill more. Who will pay the extra cost?
Screenshot reading: 2025 Top Albums Raspberry Moon | Hotline TNT Revelation | The Knocks/Dragonette Losin' | Colin Miller The Yips | Petey USA Everything Must Go | Goose Dog-Eared | Billie Marten Patience, Moonbeam | Great Grandpa Blood on the Silver Screen | SASAMI Iron | Post Animal Chain Yer Dragon | Goose
“Models just being able to memorize an answer doesn’t mean that they can generalize that information to related and nearby tasks, which is basically what we assume when we test humans on these exams,” she said. “We’re not assuming that they can only answer the questions on the exam — we’re saying, ‘Being able to answer the questions on this exam is a proxy for the general clinical knowledge base.’”
Screenshot reading: But Robinson also warned the technology will escalate the ongoing war between providers and insurers on billing that’s already resulting in an AI arms race. As health insurance companies see their profit margins decline because members are getting more care than anticipated, “the payers are not going to simply pay you more now,” he said. “They can’t.”
A lot of white pellets sitting on a piece of weigh paper on an analytical balance reading "40.0070 g"
ScienceWriters2025 Thursday Oct 23, 2025 / 12:00PM - 01:00PM "The Truth About AI: How to report on it without giving in to hype, and how to use it in the newsroom"
Screenshot of Google search results page for the search "rate limiting step kinetics -ai" with an AI overview at the top
Screenshot of Google search results page for the search "rate limiting step kinetics fuck" with an AI overview at the top
Explore the creation of a whole-genome sequencing program for life on Federal lands, led by the NSTC and including members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, DOE, NIH, NSF, the Department of Interior, and Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units to collaborate on the development of an initiative to establish a whole genome sequencing program for life on Federal lands (to include all biological domains). This new data would be a valuable resource in training future biological foundation models.
• Incentivize researchers to release more high-quality datasets publicly by considering the impact of scientific and engineering datasets from a researchers’ prior funded efforts in the review of proposals for new projects. • Require federally funded researchers to disclose non-proprietary, non-sensitive datasets that are used by AI models during the course of research and experimentation.
Invest in AI-Enabled Science Like many other domains, science itself will be transformed by AI. AI systems can already generate models of protein structures, novel materials, and much else. Increasingly powerful general-purpose models show promise in formulating hypotheses and designing experiments. These nascent capabilities promise to accelerate scientific advancement. They will only do so, however, with critical changes in the way science is conducted, including the enabling scientific infrastructure. AI-enabled predictions are of little use if scientists cannot also increase the scale of experimentation. Basic science today is often a labor-intensive process; the AI era will require more scientific and engineering research to transform theories into industrial-scale enterprises. This, in turn, will necessitate new infrastructure and support of new kinds of scientific organizations.
Emma Beavins at Fierce Healthcare has more details on the proposed workgroup, which will be working on a compressed timeline: Six months for a draft, and finalized within a year, in an effort to keep pace with HHS’s implementation deadline. That means that it will “likely” skip some steps that are usually included in the CHAI process, like community review and public comment. “This is a little bit more of a nuanced area where we may not need as much rigor as one of our more formal best practices,” CHAI CEO Brian Anderson told Beavins. How can something that is nuanced not need as much rigor as something that is less nuanced? When STAT asked CHAI for clarification, Anderson said that by “nuanced,” he was referring to the “emerging nature of” AI uses for Medicaid. “We will continue to advocate for oversight given the equity implications, but we’re also building guidance in a space where there just isn’t a deep bench of prior work to pull from,” he wrote in an emailed statement. But doesn’t the relative lack of information mean that guidelines in this space should require more study, not less? Are you also confused about this initiative? I would love to hear from you (CHAI members and non-members alike). I’m open to off-the-record or on-background conversations: brittany.trang@statnews.com, or btrang.01 on Signal.
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Meme of Anna Garcia on Dropout's show Make Some Noise. Anna is labeled as "People using AI for medical advice" and is covering up, with her hands, part of a Rorschach blob labeled "AI's ability to confidently say things that aren't true." The still is captioned "I'm sort of ignoring this."