Hard questions, harder answers: Dr. Sachin Jain of SCAN Group and Health Plan
Sachin Jain, MD, MBA is President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, where he is charged with leading the organization’s growth, diversification, and emerging efforts to reduce healthcare disparities. Previously, Dr. Jain was President and CEO of CareMore and Aspire Health, innovative care delivery systems with > $1.6B in revenues serving 200,000 Medicare and Medicaid patients and 2500 associates in 32 states. He pioneered the first clinical program in the world focused on social isolation. Dr. Jain is also an adjunct professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a contributor at Forbes.
Prior to joining CareMore, Dr. Jain was global Chief Medical Information & Innovation Officer at Merck & Coworked in leadership roles at the US Department of Health and Human Services, where he was senior advisor to the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Dr. Jain was the first acting deputy director for policy and programs at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI).
Dr. Jain graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a BA in government and continued on to earn his MD from Harvard Medical School and MBA from Harvard Business School. He trained in medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, earning his board certification in internal medicine. He is also co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Delivery Science & Innovation. For his tremendous achievements, Dr. Jain is regularly recognized as a “Top 50 Most Influential Clinical Leader” and “100 Most Influential People in US Healthcare” by Modern Healthcare.
The Real Stuff
“My career decisions have always been guided by where I can have the most impact for the frail and vulnerable ”
Dr. Jain has not avoided the hard questions, but embraced their complexity and dedicated his career to thinking about ways healthcare could be more equitably distributed. Throughout his tenure in the government, Dr. Jain realized the importance of maintaining clinical work despite a career in healthcare leadership. For him, the physician-patient relationship is grounding and humbling.
“It’s easy to get lost in papers and numbers,” Dr. Jain emphasizes, “but the real unit of change is better healthcare for each individual.”
He calls attention to a generation of clinicians who desire change in the healthcare system and think publishing an article in JAMA or NJEM will do. While seeing your name in print brings a wonderful feeling, the journal itself will not enact change. In fact, Dr. Jain urges innovators and clinicians to think about a more realistic model for reform, one that meshes academic and community lenses.
“We all think about the world in the lens of where we are, but we need to ask ourselves if our context can be generalized to other people’s issues.”
The Ugly Truth
While most medical students have a optimistic view that everyone wants the healthcare system to be better, Dr. Jain reminds us:
“Healthcare system is perfectly designed to achieve what it does: provide healthcare for some and not for others. There are lots of stakeholders who make money with this status quo. The ecosystem was built to create value for everyone except the patient. “
Think about everyone who makes a profit from a diabetic wound, preventing diabetes might just not be part of their agenda.
Dr. Jain claims that coining terms, creating journals and setting up conferences about social determinants of health (SDOH), restricts the dialogue to academic settings.
“No one knows what SDOH means.”
According to him, this fancy language obscures the fact that urban planning is set to fail for those that need it most, for example.
“SDOH is almost an escape goat, giving us an excuse not to think about new models for healthcare, simply because we cannot control the patient experience outside of the clinic.”
Leadership for change
“I think an effective leader has to be willing and able to make unpopular choices. The quest for buy-in is a quest for static equilibrium. We need to speak truth to power, acknowledge trade-offs, and mistakes.”
We have a nation of healthcare administrators, who lead groups of people through organized processes. We do not have enough leaders, those with a vision and .
Dr. Jain urges us to stay humble, for it leads to better patient care, scalable solutions across the ecosystem and instills a beginner’s curiosity that allows us to ask new questions.
Change can happen in two ways: by organic spread or by copy cat inspiration, and a mixture of both seem like a reasonable recipe. Today, when Dr. Jain sees startups and other people copying the term “Togetherness” he coined, he is not mad about it, but proud of the multiplier effect he was able to ignite.
“You cannot create change without changing,” is what Dr. Sachin Jain lives by and invites our listeners to reflect about this too.
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Story written by Luiza Perez
