It has been more than a year since COVID-19 first swept the nation and the world, causing more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. We’ve learned a lot about the virus, but still have so many questions: how has treatment improved, when can we expect for life to get back to ‘normal’ and what will the future of health care look like in a post-pandemic world?

FAH President and CEO and host of Hospitals In Focus Chip Kahn got answers from one of the most qualified voices in medicine –   HCA Healthcare’s Chief Medical Officer and President of Clinical Services Dr. Jonathan Perlin.

You may remember that Chip interviewed Dr. Perlin in March 2020 as the COVID crisis was just getting started, now, nearly a year later, they connect again. This time the pair discusses what the health care system has learned from treating more than 110,000 coronavirus patients and highlight a new initiative could change the speed and trajectory of lifesaving care. Of HCA Healthcare, Dr. Perlin states there is no other “system in the world that has integrated data that…has the capacity to offer new insights to the understanding of COVID and the improvement of its therapies.”

Kahn and Dr. Perlin discuss the future and how the world will respond to COVID in the coming years. On the path forward, Dr. Perlin says, “I think we are going to be living with this the same way we live with seasonal influenza.”

Dr. Perlin discusses the benefit of HCA Healthcare’s size in treating COVID-19 patients. “The privilege of scale isn’t size, the privilege of scale is accelerated learning and what we did – patients are a third more likely to survive COVID.” Perlin continued, saying, “We’ve learned not only how to care better for COVID patients, I think we’ve learned how to better care for our staff and all patients.”

Notably, Dr. Perlin talks about how HCA Healthcare created CHARGE, a new private-public research consortium in which members will share data in an effort to more quickly improve treatments, outcomes and patient care. The driver behind CHARGE’s creation was a shared desire “for social responsibility and a commitment to the care and improvement of human life,” according to Dr. Perlin.

HCA Healthcare announced the joint venture earlier this year, including members like the federal Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ), Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, Meharry Medical College, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and others. You can learn more about the CHARGE consortium here.

Check out Dr. Perlin’s previous appearances on Hospitals In Focus. Dr. Jon Perlin Discusses the Impact of Coronavirus on Hospitals and Dr. Jonathan Perlin Discusses How Patients Benefit from the Use of Big Data.