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As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic rapidly evolves, we are being bombarded with information regarding the disease and its spread across the globe.  A Google search with the key word ‘Coronavirus’ yielded a staggering 9.4 billion results!  It is therefore remarkable that a single article with compelling graphic animations has had such a significant impact on our understanding and adoption of social distancing as a defense against the spread of COVID-19 here in the U.S. 

We refer here to an article published in the Washington Post on March 14th by the title of Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”.  Soon after the article was published, former President Barack Obama tweeted the story to his 114 million followers, generating more than 122,000 retweets. Subsequently, the story became the most read in the website’s history.

In a simple and understandable way, the article presents four animated models that describe the spread of a hypothetical infectious disease which has similar characteristics to Coronavirus.  People are described as small dots in motion changing color as they collide with infected dots, become infected themselves and finally recover.  In the graphic presentation no one succumbs to the illness, so people are either well, ill, or recovered -- an optimistic view that allows the reader to take in the central message about the impact of social distancing on the rates of spreading the disease.  The models are compelling.  It is clear we must bend the curve -- we must reduce the spread of COVID-19. We are those “dots,” and the less we move around, the less we collide and interact with other dots, the less opportunity the virus will have to spread, it is as simple as that.  It seems as if this article has shifted our behavior more than any calls for social distancing before it.  

Take a few moments and read the article, take in the animations and pledge going forward to try to be one of the dots with very little motion, that is a commitment we have made at NextGen Healthcare. Together we can bend the curve.   

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Dr. Betty Rabinowitz headshot

Dr. Betty Rabinowitz, MD FACP

Chief Medical Officer

Dr. Betty Rabinowitz was appointed as our chief medical officer on April 19, 2018. She brings to this position more than 25 years of extensive clinical experience and expansive knowledge of population health and value-based practice transformation. In her role, Betty is tasked with helping NextGen Healthcare promote and improve our solutions in support of our clients’ provider performance, clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and financial efficiency.

Betty joined the NextGen Healthcare family in August 2017 as one of the founders and the former chief executive officer of EagleDream Health, the cloud-based analytics and population health management solutions we now know as NextGen® Population Health, which drives meaningful insights across clinical, financial, and administrative data to optimize ambulatory practice performance.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Dr. Rabinowitz graduated from Ben-Gurion University Medical School in Israel, where she also completed a residency in Internal Medicine. She came to the United States in 1990 for a fellowship in Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, where she became a professor of clinical medicine. In addition, Dr. Rabinowitz served as the medical director of the University of Rochester’s Center for Primary Care, overseeing clinical operations and population health management for the university’s large employed primary care network. In 2020, she was named on the list of the Top 25 Woman in Healthcare Software by the Healthcare Technology Report.