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  Today in Health it, we have a Wall Street Journal article on the impact of the Pandemic on Education, and I'd like for you to hear this story while thinking about healthcare. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current.

And engaged VMware has been committed to our mission of providing relevant content to health IT professionals since the start. They recently completed an executive study with MIT on the top Healthcare trends, shaping IT, resilience, covering how the pandemic drove unique transformation in healthcare.

This is just one of the many resources they have for healthcare professionals. For this and several other great content pieces, check out vmware.com/go/healthcare. Alright, here's today's story again. Wall Street Journal article June 25th, and they're really looking at seven trends that are happening as a result of the pandemic.

They look at government learning education. Which is what we're gonna talk about today. Some of the altered shopping habits and shifting wealth and those kinds of things. This one I found interesting 'cause as I was reading it, I thought there are some interesting parallels to healthcare. So let me just give you some of the story.

The pandemic and our re-emergence from it are shaping the economy, government, and business in lasting ways. College Inc is facing a reckoning. American Colleges and universities recorded their largest drop in cash inflows in decades. This past academic year, thanks to a big drop in enrollment and lack of room and board revenue from the students who did enroll, but took their courses online.

But that was just the start. Now that a generation of would-be applicants has grown used to online learning, the business of higher education will likely never be the same again. The affected schools are mostly not-for-profit, but they represent a huge enterprise with 670 billion in collective revenue, more than 300 billion in debt.

Many schools already were facing financial stress before the pandemic as they doled out more scholarships to offset stagnant . Enrollment. Many also were hurt by fewer foreign students paying full freight. Amid former president Donald Trump's less friendly visa policies with millions of students switching to remote learning institutions that specialized in online education got a boost.

They have suffered from a stigma in the past, in part because of the somewhat low standards and predatory behavior of for-profit online colleges that make most of their money from federally subsidized loans and grants. More respectable, not-For-profit schools like Purdue Global, Southern New Hampshire University, and Arizona State University now rival them in online enrollment.

Admitting less than 1%, far more selective than even Ivy League schools. It is cheaper as well, and perhaps most alarming for the college industrial complex. Google has launched a certificate program that it says it will treat as the equivalent of a four year college for hiring purposes. Every student that opts for an online college degree or the Google equivalent is another student that won't be shelling out for the far higher cost of a traditional education.

And fewer students necessary, mean fewer colleges. Residential colleges won't disappear entirely. Young people relish the experience. Big state universities as well as name brands with global snob appeal and huge endowments can survive the additional pressure piled on by the pandemic. But hundreds of smaller institutions facing precarious finances, yes, maybe even your alma mater might not if tuition and enrollment pressure outlast the pandemic.

The financial blip that hit healthcare will not hurt the name brands in their large portfolios, but it will hurt the small providers who don't have a cushion. Crackpots that bet on telehealth became big winners in the pandemic. The general public learned how to go online for care. We got care from people other than our local providers.

Digital transformation is birthing some new winners in healthcare. Livongo, Teladoc, transparent and others are really making gains. And as you read that, you also see that new models are starting to emerge. And in healthcare also new models are starting to emerge. You have the CVS, the Amazon Care. As well as literally hundreds of others.

Walmart's birthing some as well and you're gonna see many more of those. When I read this article, it really got me to thinking, what's going on in healthcare and do we really recognize the influences that are going to be impacting healthcare over the next five years? My big so what on this is that?

'cause I wanna be constructive. The big, so what is that? Healthcare is becoming a consumer business and that was spurred on by the pandemic. The longer the pandemic lingers, the more this requires bold moves into experiences for providers. These will be online and physical experiences and hybrid where people move between them.

This will be experiences for consumers health. It will have to develop experiences for providers and partners. We'll have to explore experiences for employers. That are far better than what they're getting today. Really smart people are developing alternatives for our most lucrative business, the commercially insured.

This is a new set of muscles for health systems. Leaders will have to understand how technology can be used to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital to create a seamless healthcare experience. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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Thanks for listening. That's all for now.