COVID-19: After the vaccine

GeekWire Health Tech

To say that Dr. Brad Younggren has a unique perspective on COVID-19 would be an understatement -- because he actually has multiple perspectives.

Dr. Younggren is the chief medical officer at Seattle-based healthcare startup 98point6, which has seen interest in its on-demand virtual care service skyrocket amid the pandemic. He's also an emergency physician, and the medical director for emergency preparedness, at EvergreenHealth Medical Center, in Kirkland, Wash., the first hospital in the country to manage an influx of COVID-19 patients earlier this year.

And he has been on the front lines before, literally, as a former U.S. Army physician who earned a Bronze Star and the Combat Medic Badge for his service in Iraq.

So it was with a sense of hope and cautious optimism that he received his first dose of COVID-19 vaccine last week, along with his Evergreen colleagues.

"It's been an intense year, working through this massive growth at 98point6, and seeing how we can support the country at scale," he said. "Then the individual work, taking care of patients at Evergreen, has definitely been tasking at times. It's been an emotional experience just to see the light at the end of the tunnel — that sense of hope that comes from interval change in how we're managing this pandemic."

With cases surging in the U.S., Younggren and his colleagues are careful to note that we're not out of the woods yet. But even when the world can put the pandemic into the history books, COVID-19's impact on the science and technology of healthcare will endure.

He drew parallels between his time serving in the military and the past year in the pandemic, in terms of its impact on people working in healthcare.

There's a "battle rhythm you develop, because you're basically on all the time, and there's a level of fatigue that comes from that kind of work," he said. "We're seeing a lot written about the impact of COVID-19 on the healthcare worker, and not just the physicians, the nurses and the janitors and the people who are cleaning the rooms. It's impacting the entire healthcare system. These are very stressful times from that perspective."

Younggren reflects on the past year, and talks about what's next, on this episode of GeekWire's Health Tech Podcast.

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