21 May What can we learn from the scientific and medical communities right now (pandemic edition post)
While many of us sit at home looking for things to do (in addition to writing more, I started doing puzzles and trying to make some baked goods), our global scientific and medical community is busy doing most important work. This is what we can learn from them:
1. Show up, silence the noise, and do your best work every day.
Just like many of you, I have been humbled and overwhelmed by the stories of self-sacrifice and sense of duty and honor by our healthcare and medical professionals. They don’t have enough supplies, support, tests, vaccines, time in the day – the list can go on and on – and yet they show up and do their best work every day. They are my heroes.
Marina Rodik (shared by my dear friend and ER doctor in NYC area Elena Skomorovsky) said it best on her FB post: “Next year I don’t wanna hear about the Oscar, Grammys, Tonys or Golden Globes. I don’t want to see a single pathetic actor, actress, singer, celebrity or sports person on any red carpet!!! Next year I want to see nurses, doctors, ambulance crews, health care support workers, shop workers and truck drivers, all essential workers, grocery store workers having free red carpet parties with awards and expensive goodie bags …”
2. Think globally, act locally, stay focused:
Recent NYT post put it best: “While political leaders have locked their borders, scientists have been shattering theirs, creating a global collaboration unlike any in history. Never before, researchers say, have so many experts in so many countries focused simultaneously on a single topic and with such urgency. Nearly all other research has ground to a halt.”
Many other research initiatives have been halted to focus on COVID19. Writing and publishing articles for academic journals has been set aside. Global scientific community is on a mission and they are laser-focus on it: expedite vaccinate development and find therapeutics which help the infected population.
For the research community, the “hot zone is no longer an impoverished village in the developing world. It is their hometowns.”
3. Radical collaboration:
Scientific community is radically collaborating with technology companies, ranging from AI, networks & sensors, and gene therapy, creating solutions and distributing them globally as fast as possible.
The newly created COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition is bringing together some notable players from across the healthcare and technology industries: all working toward the single aim of saving lives by helping healthcare organizations gain better data insights to fight back against coronavirus. Members so far include Amazon Web Services, Arcadia.io, athenahealth, Buoy Health, CommonWell Health Alliance, Epic, HCA Healthcare, Intermountain Healthcare, LabCorp, Leavitt Partners, MassChallenge, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, MITRE, nference, Rush University System for Health, Salesforce, University of California Healthcare System and Walgreens.
It is a powerful new ecosystem which can accelerate progress, research, logistics and medical analytics.