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What We Forgot to Remember from Covid

By Dr. Stephen Klasko and Lee Bienstock

Remember the pandemic? Overnight patients stopped coming to our hospitals. Overnight, hospitals raced to established telehealth services, often guided by prescient systems which already believed virtual care is the future. 

At Jefferson Health, where Dr. Klasko was the CEO, our telehealth physicians at the time dubbed themselves the Night’s Watch, after the Game of Thrones guards. 

The result was that in 48 hours, American healthcare accomplished what decades of conferences, white papers, and pilot programs couldn’t, genuine transformation. 

Now, five years later, we’ve perfected the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Welcome to the “Kinda After COVID” era, where we’ve managed to resurrect many of the bureaucratic barriers that were demolished during the pandemic while national studies show that 748 hospitals teeter on the brink of closure.

Before COVID, American healthcare operated like a luxury hotel that forced every guest to check in through the loading dock. We had the pilgrimage model, where sick patients traveled miles for five-minute appointments. The paper paradox meant fax machines coexisted with AI diagnostic tools. The reimbursement riddle paid for procedures, not health. And the access apartheid ensured zip codes determined life expectancy. We called it “the best healthcare system in the world” while ranking 37th globally. It was a masterclass in collective delusion.

During COVID, came the pandemic’s unexpected gift: permission to be sensible. Overnight, the “impossible” became routine. Cardiology consults happened in the living room. Regulatory red tape vanished faster than hand sanitizer and toilet paper on supermarket shelves. Home became the new hospital. Doctors discovered what social workers always knew: healthcare should occur at any address! The results? Follow-up visits skyrocketed. Chronic disease management improved. Rural communities finally got specialty care. We glimpsed healthcare’s future, and it worked. 

But here’s the sad dilemma. Instead of the dawn of a new day, we treated these innovations like wartime rations instead of peacetime prosperity.

But the reverse is true. These innovations are not wartime stopgaps. The panoply of virtual care works – telehealth, remote monitoring, specialty consultation, the use of AI to support health and predict illness, and most importantly, the ability to see people at home. 

When care comes home, magic happens. We don’t just treat disease; we witness its roots: the broken furnace triggering asthma attacks, the food desert making diabetes unmanageable, the third-floor walkup that imprisons mobility-challenged seniors. This isn’t healthcare innovation, it’s healthcare reality. Yet we’re abandoning it for the comfort of our failed past.

The new Congress and Administration face a choice: perpetuate the comfortable catastrophe or embrace uncomfortable progress. 

The One Big Beautiful Bill poses its own funding threats and opportunities, and we believe the next step is clear: We need a Federal commission for healthcare. We need to remember what we swore not to forget. 

Here’s the roadmap: 

• Make virtual care non-negotiable. If Wall Street can trade billions virtually, healthcare can handle a blood pressure check. 
• Pay for health, not just healthcare by rewarding doctors who keep patients healthy, not those who perform the most procedures. 
• Implement price transparency with teeth.  If Uber can provide an upfront fare before the ride — with clear rules about what happens if there’s traffic, detours, or cancellations — then we can do the same for surgery. 
• Use AI as a liberator, not a gatekeeper, giving clinicians time back rather than creating reimbursement challenges for patients.

Five years post-COVID, we stand at healthcare’s most critical crossroads. We can either continue our “Kinda After COVID” charade, preserving a system where hospitals collapse and communities lose access to care, or we can honor the pandemic’s hard-won lessons by making “healthcare at any address” the standard, not the exception. For the hospitals on life support and the millions of Americans one illness away from bankruptcy, this isn’t academic. It’s existential.

COVID forced us to discover that the emperor had no clothes. Now we’re desperately trying to dress him back up in the same tattered robes. The pandemic didn’t break American healthcare, it revealed what was already broken. We fixed it temporarily. Now it’s time to make those fixes permanent. Because if we can’t learn from a global catastrophe that killed millions and transformed everything, what exactly will it take? 

The future of healthcare is knocking at the front door. The only question is whether we’ll answer it.

Stephen Klasko, MD, MBA (sklasko.com) is a healthcare transformation leader and former CEO of Jefferson Health. Lee Bienstock is CEO of DocGo, pioneering healthcare delivery beyond traditional settings.