April 11, Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya
Indu & I have been talking about Flipping the Stack in health care for about 3 years. 2 years ago, we wrote an article for a general hospital audience which appeared in the 2019 AHA SHSMD Futurescan magazine. I was talking about the changes in home monitoring that might come about due to COVID-19 and remembered this article. The one that got published went through a staid editing process. This is the original version that I wrote before which was rather more fun and hasn’t seen the light of day. Until now.
April 11, Anish Koka
With the scale of the tragedy now obvious, the take away from some very smart people is that the “people who should have been paying attention, were asleep at the wheel”. Anish Koka argues that it was the world’s health police, or WHO,—whose main function is to alert the globe to impending epidemics—repeatedly violated basic common sense when dealing with imperfect information. In the face of a novel pathogen where the mode of transmission, the ease of transmissibility, and the lethality of the virus was unknown, the WHO chose to stick its head in the sand.
April 14, Ajay Kohli
Many question how large health care organizations can adapt to a rapidly evolving problem like the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when cities and even countries are struggling under the burden. But in a few regards, Kaiser Permanente is leading the way in tackling the problem. After speaking with Dr. Richard Isaacs, CEO of The Permanente Group, Ajay highlights some key features of Kaiser’s model that set them up for success in this crisis—namely, their IT infrastructure, disaster preparedness measures, and a health delivery workflow which allows them to separate routine care from their pandemic response.
April 16, Ethan Weiss
While we’ve all become familiar with the classic symptoms and complications of COVID-19, doctors are noticing other patterns—for instance issues in blood clotting in the seriously ill. New anecdotal reports have described clotting in test tubes and lines, derangements of clinical clotting assays, pulmonary emboli, large clots in the heart, as well as microvascular thrombosis. Now is the time to perform rigorous clinical studies to explore the potential benefits of drugs that modulate coagulation system activity in COVID-19.
