COVID-19 blew through health care like a tornado, causing destruction and exposing glaring flaws. But it also leaves opportunity to rebuild the industry stronger than it was before.

Dr. Lawrence Kosinski and Harold Miller, president and CEO of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, discuss what made healthcare so vulnerable and suggest payment reform principles to address it on a recent episode of The Scope with Dr. K. The podcast airs on Healthcare NOW Radio.

“Part of the reason we had a problem during the pandemic was because of the way we paid before,” Miller told Kosinski. Hospitals and physician practices only get paid when they perform a service and aren’t compensated to create and maintain capacity in the emergency room, for instance.

“The reason why hospitals and physician practices are having such difficulty now is because there was no stable funding to sustain the core capacity and so much of their funding was dependent on elective procedures which then disappeared in the middle of the pandemic,” Miller said.

Miller, who is a nationally recognized expert on healthcare payment and delivery reform, proposes an alternative way to pay hospitals and physicians that would solve for those issues.