Who and What Will Rise from the Sick Care Workforce Ashes?

The COVID-19 apocalypse has decimated society. What the future of medicine will look like over the long term is red meat for the blogosphere. HINT: No one can say for sure.

The sick care workforce is starting to come out of their foxholes and the front lines of the disease and are deciding their next steps. Some will double down. Others will double over and change their personal and professional course.

Some trends that will drive their decisions include:

1. Psychological and behavioral health impact.
2. The failure of the fee for service medicine and the business model of Sick-care, Inc struggling desperately to monetize and create incentives for value.
3. Job insecurity.
4. Distrustfulness of a system that hails them as heroes one day and furloughs or fires them the next creating a new just-in-case mentality.
5. More threats to private practice and increasing systems consolidation.
6. The availability of more non-clinical jobs.
7. Increasing biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship education, resources, networks, mentors, peer to peer support and non-clinical career guidance.
8. A new higher ed and graduate/medical school model.
9. A changed future of work and sick care jobs.
10. The collision of multiple technologies including virtual care, remote sensing, AI, blockchain, financial technologies (Fintech) and remote patient monitoring.
11. The sick care gig economy.
12. Migrating sick care to health care.
13. Unbundling primary care.
14. Inequality.
15. Opportunities to change the system.
16. Adapting to the hybrid economy.

Without changing the rules and how we select, educate and train the sick care workforce, we are likely to not only see the second wave of disease but the second wave of multi-system failure and inertia as well, leaving us in a no man's land of familiar ashes.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@ArlenMD and Facebook.