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Sachin H. Jain: How has “expert bias” mislead you in your work?

Sachin Jain/LinkedIn

Mar 30, 2025, 23:21

Sachin H. Jain: How has “expert bias” mislead you in your work?

Sachin H. Jain, President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“Expert bias is defined as ‘a systematic inclination to treat the opinion of a certain source of expertise as incontrovertible and trustworthy, and to use it as a basis for making own judgments and decisions, independently of the factual level of such expertise, but relying on superficial premises.’

Part of healthcare’s ‘leadership crisis’ is the over-reliance on ‘experts’ – conferring false or undeserved virtue to an opinion because of someone’s standing in the industry.

It shows up as – ‘so and so is involved with the organization, so it must be good/virtuous/high-performing.’

It shows up as – ‘so and so advocated for this approach, so it must be the right approach.’

It shows up as – ‘so and so made this policy recommendation and they are smart, so it must be a good recommendation.’

It shows up as – ‘so and so invested in this company so it must be worthy.’

It shows up as – ‘so and so has been doing this for 20 years, they must know what they are doing.’

Like everyone, I’ve been guilty of falling into the expert bias trap.

But we must ask – if healthcare seems only to be getting worse and note better, are our ‘experts’ all truly experts?

Are we valuing the right things?

Are we sufficiently using data to make decisions?

Are we seeing the landscape and the players and their motives clearly?

Or are we projecting the qualities we want to see onto institutions and people onto them that they may not have?

In contrast to ‘expert bias,’ healthcare and medicine also has a great tradition of using evidence and data to advance new paradigms.