Drawing from product innovation theory, Rohit Deshpande and colleagues offer three recommendations to speed adoption of COVID-19 vaccines.

The pandemic — especially the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines — has exposed the operational deficiencies of the U.S. health care system. They include valuing product innovation more than process innovation, inefficiently using its workforce, inadequately planning for known unknowns, and failing to bring the supply of care to the demand for it. However, the pandemic is also offering lessons in how to overcome these problems.

Itching to get off the COVID couch? New research by John Beshears bucks conventional wisdom about what it takes to make exercise a habit.

While hospitals battle on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, their business operations are adapting and evolving in ways that will outlast the coronavirus outbreak. Intermountain Healthcare’s roughly 40,000 employees staff some 200-plus businesses, from food service to operating rooms. The pandemic is accelerating the Utah-based non-profit’s adoption of telemedicine, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence. President and CEO, Marc Harrison discusses the company’s shift to remote work, employee support, re-skilling, and its efforts to address the crisis in healthcare affordability and access.

Even in the best of times, pharmaceutical regulators tend to rush through drug applications in December. Now add in a ruthless pandemic. Research and insights from Lauren Cohen.

To promote the greatest safety, public health officials should target their pandemic messaging to men differently than to women. Research by Vincent Pons and colleagues.

The pandemic presents a unique opportunity to investigate formation of beliefs about an unprecedented, widespread, and life-threatening event. One finding: COVID-19 makes the prospect of disease and death particularly salient for the young.

Without financial relief from Congress, many American small-business owners may be forced to cut health insurance for employees, according to research by Leemore Dafny, Yin Wei Soon, Zoë Cullen, and Christopher Stanton.

As we enter a new season, we’re facing the reality that the pandemic is not a temporary affliction, but an involuntary transition from one way of life to another. In this episode, Arthur and Ceci discuss the psychology behind why transitions—whether voluntary or involuntary—can be so uncomfortable and why our natural reaction is to resist them. Most importantly, Arthur shares how instead of working against them, we can embrace these periods of “falling tides” in our lives and reap the benefits.

Recently, a friend from college invited one of us on a hike with a relatively large group of people, some of whom we didn’t know. What would have once been a carefree outing now put us in a difficult predicament. With COVID cases still high in Boston and rising across the U.S. – not to mention a family member with an illness that put them at greater risk – we felt conflicted.

The coronavirus epidemic and the residual economic effects are spurring life transitions for a lot of people, from small changes to more dramatic “lifequakes.” How can you effectively manage life transitions of any magnitude? 

The COVID-19 pandemic is triggering widespread anxiety, depression, and addiction—deepening what many have identified as a mental health crisis. A recent study suggests that at least a quarter of American adults are experiencing pandemic-attributed, high emotional distress. Louis Gagnon, CEO of the Total Brain online mental health platform, discusses the benefits of preventative care delivered through self-monitoring apps and how analytics based on the resulting data can help companies improve well being and productivity in the workplace.

Across five studies (N=3,071), we explore the interpersonal consequences of COVID risk communication when rejecting social invitations. In Study 1, people underestimate the benefits and overestimate the costs of rejecting social invitations for risk-related reasons. In Studies 2a&b, people are more likely to communicate risk when they are focused on welfare (vs. social) concerns. In Studies 3a&b, we replicate and extend these results in the context of actual social invitations. Together, these studies suggest that people should feel less concerned about rejecting social concerns for COVID-related reasons: risk communication could be more effective, and more positively perceived than people predict. These studies also suggest that policy makers should emphasize the welfare (vs. social costs) of COVID in ongoing communications.

What are you afraid of? We’re facing a fear epidemic in America, and it’s not just due to the coronavirus. In this episode, Arthur and Ceci take a deep dive into fear—including how to understand, manage, and even neutralize it. 

COVID-19 affects more than physical health. Howard Stevenson and Shirley Spence describe how the pandemic is causing psychological trauma across a broad swath of society—and innovative methods to treat it.

Reimbursement is a key challenge for many new digital health solutions, whose importance and value have been highlighted and expanded by the current COVID-19 pandemic. Germany’s new Digital Healthcare Act (Digitale–Versorgung–Gesetz or DVG) entitles all individuals covered by statutory health insurance to reimbursement for certain digital health applications (i.e., insurers will pay for their use). Since Germany, like the United States (US), is a multi-payer health care system, the new Act provides a particularly interesting case study for US policymakers. We first provide an overview of the new German DVG and outline the landscape for reimbursement of digital health solutions in the US, including recent changes to policies governing telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. We then discuss challenges and unanswered questions raised by the DVG, ranging from the limited scope of the Act to privacy issues. Lastly, we highlight early lessons and opportunities for other countries.

The pandemic underscores US workers’ need for help with caregiving obligations. HBS graduate Lindsay Jurist-Rosner founded B2B benefits company Wellthy in 2014 after realizing that her experience juggling work and the complex care needs of her mother was shared in one form or another by a large segment of the US workforce. She talks about the scope of the challenge, how employers are starting to address it, and what the payback looks like.

By making the collection of valuable patient data feasible outside of the clinic, remote monitoring can facilitate care for conditions ranging from chronic diseases to recovery from acute episodes of care. For years, it has been touted as one of the most promising opportunities for health care in the digital age. But the pandemic has underscored its value. Indeed, policy changes introduced during the pandemic due to the riskiness of in-person patient visits have created conditions ripe for its adoption. We urge regulators to extend these changes beyond the pandemic and for health care leaders to take advantage of this window of opportunity to develop, test, and improve remote-patient-monitoring programs.

Liberia trains community workers to help medical professionals on the front lines of disease control, says Brian Trelstad. Could the model work elsewhere?

Without a vaccine for COVID-19, the medical community has turned to a century-old therapy. This paper discusses a market design approach for expanding the collection and distribution of convalescent plasma.

Through the lens of a contemporary case study, Professor Tarun Khanna shares the geopolitics of how vaccines are developed, the funding and distribution that is critical to the effort, and the global alliances that facilitate this in the world today. The HBS South Asia Research Center in Mumbai hosted the webinar.

How should the vaccine alliance Gavi respond to the worldwide need for a cure for the COVID-19 pandemic? Tarun Khanna discusses his case study on how experimentation, judicious risk taking, and entrepreneurship in finance and capital markets could unlock the science.

COVID-19 represents not only a health crisis but a crisis of food insecurity and starvation for migrants. Central governments should ensure that food security policies are implemented effectively and engage with local governments and local stakeholders to distribute food to migrants in the immediate term.

Building health is today a top priority for owners and tenants, but how do we know our offices are safe to re-enter? John Macomber and Joseph Allen offer best practices.

What lessons does the 1918 influenza pandemic offer as we respond to the coronavirus crisis? Historian and public health expert John Barry joins Joe Fuller to talk about the parallels and differences between these global virus outbreaks.

This paper provides a conceptual model for the progression of COVID-19 that is somewhat imprecise but that’s very simple and easy to understand. By relying on this description, one can obtain a rough estimate of the impact of various social distancing measures on the rate of growth of new infections.

South Korea initially had the largest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 outside of China, but new cases have decreased sharply since then. What is the country doing right? asks Doug J. Chung.

The coronavirus pandemic might lead to major changes in patient care, physician compensation, and regulation. Experts from Harvard Business School's Health Care Initiative share their predictions

With their numbers of COVID-19 patients falling, hospitals now have to figure out how to resume elective procedures and continue to care for COVID-19 patients. It’s time to invent new ways. A central business concept — the S curve — can help.

What effect does the rush to find a cure for the coronavirus have on precision medicine, clinical trials, and finding cures for other diseases? Faculty member Kathy Giusti shares expertise and insights into how COVID-19 is changing the way scientists, doctors, and patients are thinking about treatments, what the future looks like for medicine, and how health care nonprofits are pivoting to meet patient needs.

The COVID pandemic has caused enormous financial hardship. At first blush, it might be surprising that health care is among the hardest-hit sectors. As demand for medical care and therefore costs to insurers have plummeted, private insurers have begun to provide some relief to enrollees. But they should do more for providers, beginning with primary care.

Pandemic uncertainty doesn't have to spell doom. Happiness experts at Harvard Business School offer these research-based strategies for managing stress.

An online survey of more than 110,000 people in 175 countries conducted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic found that most respondents believe that their governments and fellow citizens are not doing enough, which heightens their worries and depression levels. Decisive actions and strong leadership from policymakers change how people perceive their governments and other citizens, and in turn improve their mental health.

The challenge during times of unchartered uncertainty is to find a pragmatic middle ground between acting thoughtlessly and not acting at all, say Howard Stevenson and colleagues.

In disaster movies, there is usually a make-or-break moment when the hero turns desperation into triumph with one incredible act. As we Americans watch our own real-life disaster movie called “COVID-19” unfold, we too look toward a proverbial Hail Mary solution that will let us return to normal. We are told by expert after expert that things won’t return to normal until we have a fully effective vaccine or drug remedy, and we despair when neither appears imminent. In lieu of a medical miracle, we are told we must wait for extensive testing and tracing capabilities before we can ease draconian restrictions on our economic and social lives.

In a typical year you will take two million breaths in your office.  This, however, is not a typical year.  The pandemic spawned by the novel coronavirus has forced a global reckoning with the awesome power of infectious diseases to grind economies to a halt. The forced lockdowns and retreat into home isolation has also given us a heightened awareness of the role our surroundings play in our health and wellbeing.

Professor Ashish Jha and Professor Rob Huckman discuss the clinical challenges of managing a pandemic and how the business and public health sectors need to work together.

Harvard professors John Macomber and Joseph Allen discuss the importance of healthy buildings in a post-COVID world, given that people spend the majority of their lives indoors.

Kent Thiry is a veteran healthcare executive with decades of experience observing public health policy and administration at both federal and state levels. He shares his assessment of why the US was slow out of the blocks in responding to COVID-19.

On this bonus episode of Managing Through Crisis, Sophie Bai (MBA 2020) and professor Jeff Bussgang share how PPEople First—a group of HBS students who are bringing critically needed PPE to Massachusetts healthcare workers—has successfully connected the PPE supply in China with the demand in Massachusetts, urgently and at scale.

Like it or not, humans have become an indoor species, so buildings have a major impact on our health. That's why the Healthy Building Movement is gaining momentum, say John Macomber and Joseph Allen.

As the number of COVID-19 cases nationwide continues to grow, a number of hospitals will need to convert acute care beds into intensive care beds, and discharge stable patients to post-acute care settings such as nursing homes.  In addition, nursing homes unable to care for COVID patients requiring intensive support services - or unable to isolate their COVID-positive residents - will require safe and high-quality options. We recommend designating specific nursing homes (also known as "skilled nursing facilities") to serve as "COVID-19 Skilled Care Centers" (CSSCs). Officials should identify these nursing facilities immediately, so the facilities can decline new uninfected patients and isolate/transfer uninfected longer-term residents. Download the COVID-19 Capability Scorecard (.XLSX)

Amid the outbreak of the coronavirus and weeks of social isolation, many people are feeling anxious and grappling with loneliness. In the inaugural episode of The Art of Happiness, Arthur talks with Claremont Graduate University professor Paul Zak, the pioneer of the field of neuroeconomics and leading expert on oxytocin, the “love molecule.”

Even the most vocal critic of the American health care system cannot watch coverage of the current COVID-19 crisis without appreciating the heroism of each caregiver and patient fighting its most-severe consequences. Amidst the immediacy of this crisis, it is important to begin to consider the less-urgent-but-still-critical question of what the American health care system might look like once the current rush has passed.

Now, more than ever, the right supply-chain strategies and management practices are urgently needed to optimize scarce resources, alleviate shortages, and expand capacity quickly. While good management can never be a substitute for dedicated and skilled medical practitioners, improving the management of supply chains is crucially needed to ensure that these professionals have the resources to do their jobs.

On Monday March 9, in an effort to address soaring patient demand in Boston, Partners HealthCare went live with a hotline for patients, clinicians, and anyone else with questions and concerns about COVID-19. Many callers gave up before they could speak with the expert team of nurses staffing the hotline. We were missing opportunities to facilitate pre-hospital triage to get the patient to the right care setting at the right time.

With a growing health worker shortage nationwide, doctors, nurses, and physician’s assistants are already being reallocated from other departments, drafted out of retirement, and allowed to graduate early from medical schools. But who will support them?

While South Korea had tested about 4,000 people per million of its population at the time, the United States had just run five tests per million — despite the fact that they both reported their first cases at essentially the same time (on January 21 and 20). This article examines the reasons and implications behind the discrepancy.

As policymakers around the world struggle to combat the rapidly escalating COVID-19 pandemic, they find themselves in uncharted territory. The purpose of this article is to help U.S. and European policymakers at all levels learn from Italy’s mistakes so they can  recognize and address the unprecedented challenges presented by the rapidly expanding crisis.