Episode Details

The reaction of some hospitals and health care systems to the COVID-19 pandemic has been truly breathtaking. Doctors, nurses, first responders, other staff at hospitals and elsewhere have worked hard—so hard—to support the national effort. The same can be said to some tech entrepreneurs and other businesses who have snapped into action in order to provide PPE (personal protective equipment) and artificial intelligence to the frontline health care workers.

In this health care podcast, I'm talking again with Marty Makary, MD, MPH. Dr. Makary is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, professor of surgery and health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of The Price We Pay and Unaccountable. So, this is episode 268. In this particular episode, Dr. Makary and I discuss the situation that will likely play out after the "reactive" phase of this COVID-19 pandemic (ie, March, April, May).

After about June, the pandemic, according to Dr. Makary, will start to wind down a bit; and at that juncture, there's going to be a backlog of patients who had their elective surgeries postponed and their care journeys potentially interrupted if they required an in-person visit or a lab test or an imaging study that did not happen. There will be a need to prioritize them, something that we have never really done in this country before. This is what we're going to talk about in this episode: this second phase.

Potential point of interest: Episode 267 (the one right before this episode) is about the here and now, prior to the peak, if you want to go back and listen to that when you have time.

Martin "Marty" Makary, MD, MPH, is an American surgeon, New York Times best-selling author, and Johns Hopkins health policy expert. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, Newsweek, and CNN and appears on NBC and Fox News. He has written extensively on organizational culture, the science of measuring quality in medicine, and health care reform. Dr. Makary is the author of two best-selling books: Mama Maggie, a book about a Nobel Prize nominee, and Unaccountable, a book about health care transparency. He also recently released The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care—and How to Fix It. This book offers a road map for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care.

Dr. Makary is principal investigator of a Robert Wood Foundation grant to lower health care costs in the United States by creating physician-endorsed measures of appropriate medical care and directs the national "Improving Wisely" project to reduce waste in medicine. He speaks nationally on disruptive innovation in health care. Dr. Makary is a frequent medical commentator of NBC and Fox News, commenting on the health care cost crisis, the impact of new technology, and interpreting the latest medical research for everyday consumers. Dr. Makary is director of the Center for Opioid Research and Education and founder of solvethecrisis.org, a Web site