Ashish Jha, MD, MPH

What have we learned from COVID-19? What did the pandemic expose, and teach us, here and around the globe?

- Is the US, the world, better prepared for future health crises?
- Can we, will we, ensure that when future outbreaks happen, it doesn’t lead to loss of lives and livelihoods? If yes, how?
- What is the responsibility of the private sector? The role of government? Our international obligations?
- What does history tell us about post-pandemic changes that shape societies?

- Runaway healthcare spending now threatens to sink our economy
- Eating into wage growth while ballooning the costs of overall worker compensation; bad for workers and businesses
- Swallowing state budgets, forcing deep cuts in other essential services and priorities
- Straining federal budget
- What’s driving these rising costs?
- Why do policymakers keep getting the solutions wrong?
- And what is the agenda for action?
- What can policymakers do? What about businesses? Individuals?

Climate change – is often seen as an environmental problem, which of course it is. But, It is also the most urgent, overlooked threat to health. The connection is real, immediate, and deadly.

How climate change impacts health

- Drought => Famine => Migration => Disease spread
- More respiratory illness
- Heat-related illness

Solutions demand new connections between scientists and policymakers

- Beyond reducing carbon pollution, what should healthcare systems be doing?
- Mitigation by healthcare systems – reducing their own footprint
- Understanding how climate change is going to drive big impacts on population health
- Building climate-resilient healthcare systems
- Building climate-sensitive population health strategies.
- The role of governments, businesses, and non-profit organizations in solutions

Artificial Intelligence and its Application to Medicine and Public Health

- What are the major tools of AI that might actually be useful? How? When? Where?
- What are the challenges of AI – to providers, patients, healthcare systems?
- What are the risks that are not being adequately understood or captured?
- The role of AI in transforming health and healthcare not just in the US but around the globe.

- COVID has taught us a lot about how we can keep people healthy at work
- Respiratory infections – COVID, flu, RSV, and others have a large impact on worker health, missed days of work, etc.
- When employees’ kids get sick at school, that can impact their work
- We now have tools to effectively manage respiratory infections – during typical respiratory infection seasons as well as during crisis times.
- The role of Indoor Air Quality in keeping people healthy
- Other strategies such as testing and treatments that can make a big difference
- Ultimately, this talk is focused on employers who understand typical respiratory seasons are disruptive and a bad season can be even more so – but we now have the tools to manage it far more effectively.