Sachin Jain: Ease of communication and access has been replaced be centralization and bureaucratization

Sachin Jain posted on LinkedIn:

“One of the things that bothers clinicians most about the state of American healthcare towards is how much bigger many hospitals and health systems became without any real benefit to patients.

When healthcare institutions were smaller, doctors and nurses knew the names of nearly everyone who worked within them and could pick up the phone and make things happen for patients.

Need an extra few hours of case time in the operating room?
Need some new equipment for a new procedure?
Have a question or concern about a new policy.
Answers were just a phone call or two away.
People felt ownership.

Today, ease of communication and access has been replaced be centralization and bureaucratization.
Makework and forms have replaced common sense.
Scale has bolstered the finances of organizations in an increasingly consolidated industry environment—but doctors and nurses and patients have gotten lost in the shuffle.

Which comes to the modern leadership mandate.
Regardless of job any healthcare leader occupies—and even as healthcare organizations get bigger and more complex—the mandate is to strive to make the big feel small and intimate.

What are the ways we can make big feel small?

• Empower frontline leaders to make decisions.
• Organize people into intimate units where they have repeated interactions with one another and build trust.
• Consolidate operations only when there is a clear definable benefit

As counter cultural as it is in most organizations, on the other side of ‘small’ is better patient care and better team morale.”

Source: Sachin Jain/LinkedIn

Sachin Jain is the President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. He also serves as a Board Member at The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, an Academic Hospitalist (WOC) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and a Board Member at America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). He is also a board member of Omada Health.