Never Waste a Crisis: The Imperative to Reinvent Healthcare After Covid-19
To succeed in the post-pandemic world, all of us―patients, caregivers, providers, employers, investors, technologists, and policymakers―need to understand the new healthcare landscape and change our strategies and behaviors accordingly.
In his book, Care After Covid, Dr. Nundy shows all stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem exactly what needs to change and, more importantly, how to do it. To wrap up a day of knowledge sharing, practicing physician, business leader and Chief Medical Officer of Accolade, Dr. Nundy will highlight components of his plan to transform healthcare along three dimensions: distributed, digitally enabled, and decentralized healthcare.
Never Waste a Crisis: The Imperative to Reinvent Healthcare After Covid-19
Shantanu Nundy, MD
Chief Medical Officer for Accolade and author of Care After Covid
Reinvent Healthcare by Reducing Long Wait Times that Decrease Specialist Access
In order to understand the different reasons that patients struggle to access care, it is essential to take a look at what contributing to the issue. There are many reasons that patients do not access specialty care. Social determinants of health (SDOH) like the travel distance required to access specialty care in rural areas, cost, disability, and many more. However, the issue that impacts patients nationwide is the long wait times for healthcare that limit appointments with specialists.
Patients are frequently told that specialists aren’t able to see them for several weeks or even months from the time that the patient receives a referral and attempts to make an appointment. This creates a backlog of patients who often don’t get seen by a specialist because the patient seeks care in another location, like the ED, or decides that the appointment isn’t necessary. So much time between the date the appointment is scheduled and the date of the appointment leads to forgotten and missed appointments and scheduling conflicts. This is why we need to reinvent healthcare.