One thing that has not changed is providers’ desire to provide excellent patient care and service, and patients’ need to feel comfortable and well cared-for in the ambulatory environment. It is also still true that patients often judge the overall quality of their care based on the service experience at the hospital or office, and that perception is based on a comparison between their pre-visit expectations and their actual experience during the visit.

A broad range of federal programs were allocated funding through the $150 billion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress. But getting that money, either through FEMA or other agencies, has caused some confusion for governments, institutions, organizations, and individuals in search of COVID-19–related aid.

Where hospitals were once coached by safety professionals to ensure they had enough PPE stockpiled, they are now begging the U.S. government to share PPE from the stockpile. Once upon a time, workers were told to use their surgical masks only once. Today, those masks get put into a bag at the end of a shift and used the next day—and maybe the day after that.

Since the emergence of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in December 2019, public health authorities and professional societies have been scrambling to develop management guidelines for clinicians to utilize. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distributed their first guidance in late January and have made continual revisions to date, with many professional societies following suit.

Since medication nonadherence already accounts for 50% of treatment failures, approximately 125,000 deaths, and up to 25% of hospitalizations each year, it has become more important than ever for physicians, pharmacists, and insurance companies to work together to keep patients on their prescriptions.