Newsweek: Plans to Help Underserved Communities Will Fail Without New Forms of Community Engagement | Opinion

Nancy Oriol

The American health care system, battered by two-plus years of COVID-19, staff burnout and declining public trust, could be forgiven for a period of retrenchment and nostalgia for “the way things used to be.” If that happens, however, we will miss the best opportunity in a generation to apply the innovations of the moment to build a better and more just system of care and delivery.

Our pandemic experience reinforced two key points that merit constant repetition. The first is that better engaging with our communities means working with them and actually listening to them. The second is that too much of how our health care payment system is structured gets in the way of how care should actually be delivered.