Health care 5 years after COVID

In March 2020, we were bracing for upheavals in our daily lives. COVID-19 had come to our shores, and doctors were at a loss at how to treat it, let alone prevent it from spreading.

And spread it did. COVID became the third leading cause of death after cancer and heart disease. Not only was COVID a serious threat, it kept us from going to doctors for routine health care, which made chronic conditions, such as Type 2 diabetes, worse.

Today, COVID-19 is better understood and most of us have resumed our normal routines. Five years later, though, we are still living with its legacies, both positive and negative, as it pertains to health care.

Here are a few of the ways COVID is still changing your health care.

Telehealth became widely accepted

Online medical services were very limited before COVID and rarely, if ever, covered by Medicare and private insurance. That changed with the pandemic, and it’s been all to the good.

Reduced regulation and insurance coverage made telehealth more accessible and affordable, particularly for those in rural areas and seniors unable to travel to a doctor’s office. Studies have found that outcomes are comparable to those obtained through in-person care. Technology has continued to improve as well.

There’s a big “however,” here.

The emergency order covering telehealth was issued during the first Trump administration, and it was extended twice under the Biden administration. The last emergency extension for telehealth coverage expires March 31, which means that starting April 1, coverage for telehealth services will be sharply limited.

Some in Congress are hopeful that a bipartisan measure to keep telehealth going will be enacted, so I recommend you contact your representatives and urge them support it.

Remote medical care is routine

In response to COVID and the need to keep people from sitting in doctors’ offices, tech companies raced to create RMDs — remote medical devices. Today, you can take your blood pressure at home and the readings can be sent to your doctor’s office. Same for monitoring of other chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease.

This not only benefited patients, but also doctors and those tech companies. Doctors are allowed to bill Medicare for every patient being remotely monitored, whether or not they personally reviewed the data. Some unscrupulous marketers, meanwhile, are trying to sign up seniors for remote monitoring without their doctors’ knowledge.

“It’s the Wild West out there,” says an attorney who advises health providers. So this is a decidedly mixed bag: some good, some not so good.

Vaccine development sped up

The discovery that an effective vaccine could be developed using the structure of the virus (messenger RNA, or mRNA) let scientists come up with safe and effective COVID vaccines in a matter of months rather than years.

This technique was also used to create the RSV vaccine and is the basis for a whole raft of vaccines under development or in clinical trials to treat everything from the flu to HIV to cancer to Alzheimer’s.

Patients still struggle with long COVID

The Kaiser Family Foundation reported, “As the nation moves further from the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of long COVID remain steady and 7% of all adults — roughly 17 million people — reported currently having long COVID in March 2024.”

This suggests that the condition may persist indefinitely for some people, unless new treatment and prevention options are found. Long COVID is also difficult to diagnose because its symptoms (fatigue, “brain fog,” muscle pain, shortness of breath, to name a few) could be almost anything.

The people most vulnerable to long COVID include seniors, those with underlying health conditions, those who had severe COVID infections and the unvaccinated.

The health care system cracked under pressure

The pandemic brought about an unprecedented exodus of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals from the field because of burnout and PTSD. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that turnover remains high and “the pandemic may have long-lasting implications for workers' willingness to remain in health care jobs.”

In my view from the front lines, I have seen patients bear the unfortunate consequences: delayed care, more infections, higher rate of complications and mortality, higher risk of errors and decreased satisfaction. This level of frustration is why patients are turning to private patient advocates in ever increasing numbers.

COVID-19 seemingly came out of nowhere in early 2020. Hopefully the lessons COVID taught will help us through the next pandemic.

• Teri (Dreher) Frykenberg, a registered nurse, board-certified patient advocate, is the founder of www.NurseAdvocateEntrepreneur.com, which trains medical professionals to become successful private patient advocates. She is the author of “How to Be a Healthcare Advocate for Yourself & Your Loved Ones,” available on Amazon. Frykenberg offers a free phone consultation to readers. Contact her at Teri@NurseAdvocateEntrepreneur.com.