If the healthcare system were an emperor, Covid-19 tragically revealed that it had no clothes. Healthcare had to adapt, and quickly—hundreds of thousands of lives were being lost to the ravaging pandemic. Driven by necessity, we witnessed a dramatic acceleration of virtual care, drive-thru testing, and home-based services. In the process, old rules were rewritten and, perhaps surprisingly, largely in a good way. To come out ahead, all healthcare stakeholders—patients, caregivers, health systems, employers, investors, and policymakers—need to understand this new landscape and change their behaviors and strategies accordingly.
In Care After Covid, practicing physician, technologist, and business leader Dr. Shantanu Nundy, Chief Medical Officer at Accolade, which provides healthcare services to Fortune 500 companies—including Facebook, United Airlines, American Airlines, Lowe’s, Comcast, and Fidelity—shows how to transform healthcare along three dimensions:
- Distributed: healthcare will happen where health happens. It will shift from where doctors are to where patients are—at home, in the community, and increasingly on their phones.
- Digitally enabled: healthcare and the relationships that are central to care will be strengthened by data and technology. It will shift from being siloed to connected, from being episodic to continuous, from one-size-fits-all to more personalized.
- Decentralized: healthcare decisions and resources will be in the hands of those closest to care. The power to determine who gets care and how they get it will shift away from governments and insurance companies to communities, employers, doctors, and patients.
What this pandemic has necessitated and set in motion is nothing short of a reinvention of how healthcare is delivered. Care After Covid shows all stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem exactly what needs to change and, more importantly, how to do it. We can’t afford not to.
