Contributor: Heather Aspras, WG’08
To learn more about Heather, click here.
“If medicine can’t see or name the problem, it can neither study nor treat it.”
~ Meghan O’Rourke, “The Invisible Kingdom”
At the time of this writing, we are planning our first in-person board meeting for the WHCMAA since February 2020. I’ve been so fortunate to get to work with such a resilient and outstanding group of individuals, and to connect with such a talented group of alumni, as we navigated through the pandemic.
Though we can’t officially declare the pandemic over, we certainly seem to be turning a corner, in terms of numbers and in terms of mentality. It seems clear that we cannot ever go back to the “normal” we had in 2019; instead, we will be carving out a new reality in the post-pandemic world. As leaders in healthcare, our alumni base will play a huge role in shaping that reality within the healthcare ecosystem.
Last year, we were fortunate to have Dr. Shantanu Nundy speak with us about his book, “Care After COVID: What the Pandemic Revealed is Broken in Healthcare and How to Reinvent It.” Dr. Nundy discussed three dimensions for lasting transformation. Healthcare should be 1) distributed (shifting from where doctors are to where patients are), 2) digitally-enabled (data and technology will facilitate greater connection and personalization of care), 3) decentralized (healthcare decisions will shift from governments and insurers to physicians, patients, employers, and communities). This book provides a practical action plan that is timely for us to revisit as we emerge from the past two years.
Another extremely timely read is Meghan O’Rourke’s new book, “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimaging Chronic Illness.” O’Rourke uses her own journey with chronic illness to highlight some of the challenges inherent in our medical system – the narrow specializations of physicians that prevent connecting the dots for conditions that impact multiple systems of the body; lack of insurance coverage; and skepticism of patients who can’t “prove” that something is wrong with them with traditional tests.
These reminders of the challenges in healthcare are more relevant than ever, given an untold number of patients continue to suffer from “long COVID,” the constellation of symptoms that encompasses everything from brain fog to incapacitating fatigue. This is one legacy and the crisis COVID will leave in its wake, even after the acute phase of the pandemic is over.
We have the opportunity to not only address long COVID, but also to use this occasion to:
- shed light on similar conditions that have existed in the past and have been underfunded and understudied, like chronic fatigue syndrome and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS).
- turbocharge efforts to address the voluminous and longstanding health inequities that are under klieg lights as a result of the pandemic
I know our alumni network is up to the task, whether we’re treating patients as physicians, studying new treatments, or starting new companies to address these challenges.
Kind regards,
Heather Aspras, WG’08
President, Wharton Health Care Management Alumni Association
Contact Heather at:
[email protected]