Dr. David Nash and I had thought Covid had killed our book idea. But in August of 2020, we simultaneously realized the opposite was true.
Covid perfectly framed what we wanted to say.
And so began one of the most satisfying collaborations of my career, as co-author with a brilliant mind whose skills and knowledge were complimentary and perfectly in synch with my own.
David is a famous and influential doctor, a pioneer of the field of population health, an expert on health quality, and founding dean emeritus of the Jefferson College of Population Health.
Before the pandemic, we talked about a book looking at American health as a system, not only in the workings of health care, but also the even more important factors of the food we eat, the places we live and work, our social and racial differences, and the culture itself.
David spent his career diagnosing this ailing life-support system. His insights would have been our subject. Then Covid upped the intensity, making these same lessons undeniable, dramatic, and urgent.
I’m extremely proud of my part in writing How Covid Crashed the System: A Guide to Fixing America’s Health Care. The book created something of lasting value out of those lost years when more than a million Americans died, many of them needlessly.
David Nash made the work possible. We had a deep meeting of the minds.
I’ve worked with other co-authors successfully without creating such a strong connection. David gets the credit here. He is a skilled educator, talented at expressing his ideas, and his life’s work honed his ideas to crystal clarity, surrounding them with abundant supporting evidence.
My contribution was to take this precious material out of the specialist world and express it in language anyone could understand, showing real people gripped by these issues, and, in the context of Covid, the immediacy of how problems in our nation’s health system disrupted and took lives.
I’m a science journalist, and I love to dig through scientific papers and learn what’s happening right now. I did dozens of interviews with the world’s top experts in the middle of the crisis—with David’s name as a magic key to open up those conversations.
Through the months of work, we talked on Zoom (never in person during the pandemic), exploring what we were learning and shaping discoveries into a narrative.
The most important signal that the collaboration was working came when I shared the first draft. David loved it. His revisions were all improvements, all pulling us further on the path we had originally chosen together, in the same direction as my own thoughts.
A great collaboration creates something better than either author could do alone. We went even father than that this time. Our synergy produced something uniquely important.
Published October 2022, the book still has plenty of life in it, after multiple printings, distribution to students and doctors, and an significant award. Covid was the frame, but the message remains as important as ever.
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