In a recent episode of Lifers, we spoke with Dr. Sachin Jain, the president and CEO of SCAN Group and SCAN Health Plan, which serves more than 300,000 members across the U.S.
Jain, who has more LinkedIn followers than nearly any other healthcare executive, is candid on social media about the flaws of the healthcare system.
“We normalize the abnormal. And I think the work that we have to do in healthcare is to stop normalizing abnormal things,” says Jain, who also served as a chief medical information and innovation officer at Merck and a senior advisor to the Obama Administration.
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Jain champions one core principle as the missing piece that could transform the American healthcare system: radical common sense.
“Common sense is not given enough credit or value in an ecosystem that really values innovation,” he tells us. “Sometimes, common sense is innovation. And I don't know that we necessarily view it as such.”
For one, as the previous CEO of CareMore Health and Aspire Health, Jain deployed radical common sense when implementing non-emergency medical transportation. “When other health plans were kind of continuing to partner with the existing vendors, we just said, 'Why don't we partner with Uber or Lyft?’” he says, adding it helped improve no-show rates and patient satisfaction.
When Jain thinks about the transformative effect radical common sense can have on the healthcare system, he thinks of his Dad.
“I lost my father a couple of years ago. He was a diabetic, diagnosed when he was 40 years old. He had intensive interventions between the ages of 40 and 50,” Jain says. “He might still be sitting here today. Instead, he died on dialysis after a hip fracture.”
In the episode, Jain touches on the power of radical common sense, his take on the growing concierge medicine ecosystem, the future of primary care, and more.
The ‘truth-telling problem’ in U.S. healthcare
Jain says too many people in healthcare have accepted the status quo, and that is true on both sides (payers and providers).
“Lots of healthcare organizations really operate like they're law firms that happen to deliver a healthcare product or healthcare services,” he says. “Part of what we're talking about here is the broken culture of leadership in healthcare, which sometimes ends up being more about compliance with rules than it is about actually doing the right thing.”
Instead of accepting reality, Jain says true healthcare innovation begins with believing the status quo can be changed and with developing a plan of action to tackle common problems.