Before large hospitals evolved into the specialty-focused behemoths of today, their primary mission was caring for a wide range of acute illnesses. The urgency of this crisis has forced our health care delivery systems to fall back on strengths and strategies that had eroded over the past several decades as these systems have become increasingly corporatized. Yet, while coping with these wrenching changes, some aspects of this calamity have provided a certain comforting familiarity to general clinicians who have been practicing medicine for several decades. Health systems in some areas, such as New York City, are overwhelmed and desperate. With what seems to have been a flip of a switch, clinics have gone virtual. Whole hospitals have been completely redesigned and rearranged in days and new ones have been constructed and dismantled almost overnight. Nowhere has this daily upheaval been more palpable than in our health care delivery systems.

It seems that the world around us has become newly strange and, at times, unrecognizable. The daily adjustments to labile governmental recommendations and policy have been unsettling, confusing, and occasionally unnerving. The volume of information about the epidemiology, clinical course, and biology of the SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) virus has been at once breathtaking and overwhelming. The rapid evolution of our understanding of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the international response has demonstrated sophistication far beyond the reaction to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in the early 2000s.

Shared Decision Making and Communication.

Scientific Discovery and the Future of Medicine.

Health Care Economics, Insurance, Payment.

Clinical Implications of Basic Neuroscience.

Challenges in Clinical Electrocardiography.

Back to the future icon