brandonb

9,101 karmajoined 15 лет назад

Data for good.

Co-Founder at Empirical Health (https://empirical.health). Don't die of heart disease.

Before: Co-Founder @ Cardiogram (ML for heart health)

  CTO at Sift Science (YC S11, machine learning to fight fraud)

  Data Science @ UCSF Cardiology

  HealthCare.gov rescue team

  Google (Android speech recognition, search ads ML)

twitter.com/bballinger

brandonb.cc

Submissions

[untitled]

1 pointsby brandonb9 часов назад0 comments

German lawmakers pass cost-saving bill that drugmakers say will drive them out

1 pointsby brandonb13 часов назад0 comments

Cancer cases worldwide are expected to soar in the coming decades

washingtonpost.com

15 pointsby brandonbпозавчера11 comments

Researchers uncover possible cause of muscle pain from cholesterol medication

medicalxpress.com

8 pointsby brandonbпозавчера0 comments

Utah lets AI refill prescriptions. Doctors are wary

5 pointsby brandonb4 дня назад1 comments

Millions may be getting the wrong cholesterol test

sciencedaily.com

7 pointsby brandonb5 дней назад0 comments

Medicare's health tech spending test

2 pointsby brandonb9 дней назад0 comments

Combined LDL-C, Lp(a) and HsCRP Assessment Identifies Long-Term Risk of Ascvd

2 pointsby brandonb10 дней назад0 comments

Medicare starts covering GLP-1 drugs for weight loss

washingtonpost.com

13 pointsby brandonb10 дней назад2 comments

LLM-style scaling laws hold for sensor data

empirical.health

3 pointsby brandonb10 дней назад0 comments

TabFM: A zero-shot foundation model for tabular data

research.google

97 pointsby brandonb10 дней назад14 comments

Wearable foundation models: a brief history

empirical.health

3 pointsby brandonb10 дней назад1 comments

Serious statin side effects on muscles are rare, new research confirms

2 pointsby brandonb15 дней назад0 comments

Medicare's ACCESS model: outcome-based payment for health technologies

2 pointsby brandonb16 дней назад0 comments

Machine learning rediscovers equations governing ocean biogeochemistry

2 pointsby brandonb16 дней назад0 comments

$0 copays could save billions

washingtonpost.com

5 pointsby brandonb16 дней назад0 comments

Dietary cholesterol activates a Ral-dependent pathway driving LDLR turnover

2 pointsby brandonb16 дней назад0 comments

U.S. health spending on pace to hit $6T

31 pointsby brandonb16 дней назад31 comments

An ECG biomarker for sudden cardiac death discovered with deep learning

9 pointsby brandonb16 дней назад0 comments

Cardiometabolic Health in Pregnancy

2 pointsby brandonb17 дней назад0 comments

comments

10 дней назадdiscuss

GLP-1s will cost $50 / month for those eligible.

To be eligible, you need either a BMI of >=35, or a BMI of >=27 and a set of specific health conditions (uncontrolled hypertension, chronic kidney disease, pre-diabetes, etc). You also can't be qualified for GLP-1s under Medicare's previous Part D coverage.

In practice these criteria are narrower than they look. Of the 13 million Medicare beneficiaries with overweight or obesity, about 4 million actually qualify, because most are excluded for already having a diagnosis, like type 2 diabetes or sleep apnea, that covers a GLP-1 another way.

10 дней назадdiscuss

(OP here) Happy to answer questions!

15 дней назадdiscuss

Very sad news. :(

16 дней назадdiscuss

Right now lots of good health companies hiring, including my own (Empirical). https://www.workatastartup.com/ lets you filter YC companies to see health startups, by stage and location (or remote).

16 дней назадdiscuss

IMO, there's an interesting opportunity for AI to make healthcare deflationary.

For example, Medicare is launching a new program in July that pays a fixed rate for achieving defined outcomes, like lowering blood pressure or cholesterol. Medicare's explicit goal here is to create incentives to automate the repetitive parts of care delivery with software. (Much of preventive cardiology is surprisingly algorithmic and guideline-driven, so this is more plausible than it seems.)

This reverses the incentives of the current system, where CPT codes incentivize doing more "stuff" (but not necesarily delivering the most effective care efficiently).

If you're a software engineer who cares about health, and have been sitting on the sidelines till now, I think the next few years are a really interesting time to make a contribution.

17 дней назадdiscuss

It's pretty well-established science now that vitamin D is a hormone, not a true vitamin. Vitamin D binds a nuclear receptor that regulates roughly 1,000 to 2,000 genes (5-10% of the human genome).

The "Vitamin D" moniker has just stuck around since it was named in 1922.

17 дней назадdiscuss

TARGET-D is an in-progress study that supplements vitamin D based on blood levels (your idea).

17 дней назадdiscuss

Another more recent trial (TARGET-D) is showing a 52% reduction in heart attack risk: https://www.empirical.health/blog/vitamin-d-heart/

That trial used a dynamically-adjusted dosage of a vitamin D3 supplement, where dosing was set as to keep blood levels within a target range of 40–80 ng/mL. IMO part of the reason this trial is showing better results than the previous clinical trials of vitamin D supplementation quoted in the above article is that vitamin D has bad effects if too low and too high. Adjusting the dose dynamically to achieve an optimal range gets you the benefits without some of the negative effects.

22 дня назадdiscuss

Biggest changes in the new guidelines from the American Heart Association / American College of Cardiology:

  - Universal Lp(a) testing recommended for everyone - Lp(a) is the strongest hereditary risk factor for heart disease.
 -  Risk Equations switched to PREVENT, which predicts both 10-year and 30-year risk.
  - Treatment is now recommended for younger adults, based on these 30-year risk scores.
  - CAC scans recommended in more cases (for intermediate risk).
  - Specific LDL targets are back, after being removed in the 2013 guideline

The actual guidelines are long and make 52 distinct recommendations, but these are the ones that jumped out as the biggest new changes.

24 дня назадdiscuss

FYI - when I view the page (from New York), the language shows up in French.

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

This paper is being published at ICLR 2026 (top AI conference), and was selected as one of three outstanding papers.

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

(OP) The science behind eggs being healthy, or at least not harmful for heart health, has been pretty settled for decades.

Unfortunately, official medical guidelines take a while to catch up. It's only in 2026 that the American Heart Association put out updated dietary guidance which makes it official that most people shouldn't limit dietary cholesterol. Fiber and saturated fat are more important drivers of blood cholesterol, which is still recommended as a major risk factor (alongside blood pressure, inflammation, HbA1c, and so on).

The post also tries to explain why there was a limitation on eggs and cholesterol in the first place, starting from the 1968 guidelines.

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

The graph y axis is showing fractions (i.e., 0.21 is 21%). Sorry for the slightly confusing label.

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

For most of these metrics, zero is not a logically possible data point. For example, somebody with an HbA1c of 0 would be dead.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

The existing CPT codes (roughly) pay proportionately to physician time (RVUs). So I wouldn't say there's an an incentive toward delivering care efficiently, but rather hospital management wants to maximize billable hours.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Medicare is a government-run insurance program, so this is one of the few cases where a private insurance company wouldn't receive data.

(There is such a thing as Medicare advantage, where a patient can choose to put their Medicare dollars toward private insurance, but it's not part of the initial launch of this program.)

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Isn't the first em dash taken from an interview that the writer did with the subject over Zoom? I think using an em dash to punctuate a broken or partial sentence like that is pretty standard journalistic practice when you don't want to modify the original quotation (e.g, denote a paraphrase with brackets), and definitely not an AI tell.

The other uses are honestly pretty standard rhetorical patterns; they do not seem especially AI-flavored to me.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

I run a YC startup that was accepted to Medicare ACCESS.

Historically, insurance has paid for activity: time spent in visits, RVUs generated, and minutes logged. This was a reasonable starting point, but the flaw is that there's no strong incentives to be efficient.

ACCESS is explicitly a "deflationary" approach. Medicare has set the payment rates high enough to be viable for startups, but low enough that you have to use software (including AI) to deliver a large part of your program.

So Medicare has basically created economic incentives to reward software without prescribing the exact shape of the programs. I thought it was a really interesting approach and builds on 15 years of lessons from CMMI (Medicare's innovation group).

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Lipoprotein(a) is the strongest hereditary risk factor for heart disease. Each Lp(a) particle is basically an LDL cholesterol particle with an extra wrapper protein.

This statement is from lipidologists (basically, people who study cholesterol), but the American Heart Association released similar guidelines in Mar 2026 which recommend Lp(a) testing for everybody.

Only 1 in 400 people test Lp(a) today, although that's up 22x in the last decade: https://www.empirical.health/blog/lpa-testing/

Four major drugs are in development that target Lp(a) specifically; one of them lowers it by 94%.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Previous generations might have said the same thing about Ableton itself, vs playing a physical instrument. In that regard, AI might become just another power tool for creative expression.