Two medical professionals analyze data on a computer screen in the hallway of a hospital. Health care leaders have known for 20 years how to lower health care costs and improve the quality of care. But those strategies aren't put into practice.
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Unleashing latent innovation comes down to common sense. But not just any common sense. Radical common sense. So says Sachin Jain, MD, MBA, President & Chief Executive Officer of SCAN Group and Health Plan, who joins the Oliver Wyman Health Podcast to talk about virtual care, health equity, what consumers want, and SCAN’s work to address homelessness as a health care problem. In this show, Sachin and host Tom Robinson, a Health and Life Sciences partner at Oliver Wyman, talk about how leaders can align their management styles with those of the people they work with.
Sachin advises health care leaders to make their organizations unnecessary by improving the health of the communities they serve. The future of health care, he says, is already here. But it’s unevenly distributed.
On the root cause of homelessness and the role of health care:
“What if a medical group were truly at risk for the total cost of care? Could you actually build a better mousetrap for serving people experiencing homelessness? Alongside that is this notion that how you define a problem actually influences how you solve a problem. … We’ve historically defined homelessness as a housing issue. … but it doesn’t necessarily get to the underlying issue, which is that many of these folks have serious health care problems that go alongside their lack of access to housing.”
On the ‘slow creep’ of innovation in health care
“We need more radical common sense. … There’s things that we know work today that lower health care costs that improve quality that we’ve known work for 20 years that we don’t necessarily do in practice. … The question is how do we unleash latent innovation? Physicians, health care workers are actually largely innovative people, forward- thinking people, creative people, who somehow, when they enter these health care organizations, are socialized and trained to think that change needs to be slow.”
On behavioral health:
“We have a huge workforce issue. As there’s … greater and greater acknowledgement and destigmatization of behavioral health issues, there’s more demand for it. And you’re seeing that more and more people need these services. … What I worry about most in this space is the devaluation of expertise. … The integration with primary care, and I think this is where we can massively expand the behavioral health workforce if you actually train primary care docs to be confident generalists.”
