EP267: COVID-19—From Now Until June: Action Steps for Hospitals, Payers, Employers, Pharma, With Marty Makary, MD, MPH

Marty Makary, MD, MPH, is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins. He’s a professor of surgery and health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University. And he’s also the author of The Price We Pay and Unaccountable. I had the honor of speaking with Dr. Makary last week, and I learned a lot. For one, the worst is between now and June. For two, it’s all about ramping up capacity as fast as possible in our hospitals. We talk a lot, Dr. Makary and I, about what that looks like and what other stakeholders like employers and Pharma can be doing right now in this very, very reactionary phase.

Spoiler alert: On Thursday this week, a second episode with Dr. Makary will be out. In this second show, Dr. Makary discusses the next phase of this pandemic when all of the pent-up demand becomes a backlog of patients who need care for everything else besides COVID over the summer.

You can learn more at martymd.com or connect with Dr. Makary on Twitter at @MartyMakary. 

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 that shares expert opioid prescribing recommendations for common medical procedures for clinicians and patients. 

At Johns Hopkins, he has served as the endowed chair of gastrointestinal surgery, director of surgical quality and safety, and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Surgical Outcomes Research and Clinical Trials. Dr. Makary is a surgical oncologist specializing in minimally invasive surgery and teaches health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He currently serves as the chief of the Johns Hopkins Center for Islet Transplantation and director of the appropriateness in medicine project.

01:38 What happened that made Marty Makary sound the alarm bells on COVID-19.
03:12 Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
04:21 “Everyone has an opinion, but no one’s listening.”
06:00 What the next 4-6 weeks will look like.
08:22 What we should do to support our highest-risk patients: health care workers.
09:16 How long will this initial phase last?
13:10 What business leaders should be doing right now.
16:11 “Critical care generally pays very well.”
17:15 Marty’s concern for rural hospitals.
17:30 “If we’re going to overfund [something], I’d like it to be our hospitals.”
20:54 “I think the pharma industry has also gotten a wake-up call … Maybe we should start working on viruses.”
24:04 “We’re at war with COVID-19 right now.”
25:32 “We need to help researchers that are working specifically on lowering deaths from COVID-19.”
28:23 “Anything that can wait 3 months must wait 3 months.”
30:37 “We need everybody.”
31:38 “Hospitals need to be focused on building capacity, number one.”