Vivek Murthy

And I think what's happened in different communities around the country is that care itself has been interrupted for people with substance use disorders.

Some of them are finding it harder to get the counseling care that they need.

Some of their health care providers are finding it hard to provide services at a distance.

And that's a technology problem.

It's also a much broader problem with how we have embraced and integrated telehealth into our larger approach to healthcare.

And when it comes to getting medications, getting buprenorphine, getting other medications that are important for folks with substance use disorders is also harder.

So what we're seeing is more stressors that will tip people toward relapse at the same time as we're seeing a functional reduction

in the services that people are getting.

And I think, unfortunately, we're going to see the consequences of that show up in the coming weeks and months.

I think this is waking us up to is the fact that we've got to do such a better job of ensuring that people can get

high quality care, but that they can also get it in flexible settings.

When I think about the future, I think about a society that needs fewer and fewer clinics and hospitals, because we're doing two things better, because we're bringing care to where people are in their homes and in their neighborhoods, and also because we're doing better at prevention, at changing those underlying drivers of health, whether they be someone's access to food, their ability to actually get out and exercise, their ability to form strong social connections.

What this epidemic has done is just pull back the curtain on the good, bad, and the ugly of what's happening in our healthcare system.

It's shown us that we've got heroic staff.

We've got extraordinary nurses and doctors and frontline workers, that we've got many hospital systems that are working well and that have risen to the challenge.

But it's also showing us just how incredibly uneven things continue to be, how access is so difficult, how quality is still so variable, and how we have just

frankly failed in medicine to use technology to its fullest extent, to be able to deliver not just the care that people need, but to actually handle the data that we receive and generate the insights that we need so we can target care in the most appropriate way.

This is a call for us to do that better, to do it faster, to do it more aggressively so that not only we're prepared for the next pandemic, recognizing that even COVID-19 is going to go on for some time, but also so that even in between pandemics, we can frankly just provide better care to people and do the job I think that they expect of their medical and public health systems.

I think your warning is so appropriate because what happens in general, not just around

healthcare, but in every realm of life, is after a crisis, people slip back to the way it was before the crisis, right?