Sachin H. Jain: Every so often people in healthcare get enamored of a company or healthcare leader who can lead the way to a new future
Sachin H. Jain, President and CEO of Scan Group and Health Plan, shared on LinkedIn:
“Every so often people in healthcare get enamored of a company or healthcare leader (oftentimes an outsider) who can lead the way to a new future.
I’ve been guilty of it myself.
But when the dust settles, there is a trail of failure and disappointment and unfulfilled expectation that follows.
The usual explanation or refrain is—“healthcare is hard.”
And it is.
But what if we stopped waiting for others who know less and have less experience to be our saviors?
What if we gave responsibility for changing healthcare to ourselves instead of outsourcing it?
How would our behaviors change?
Today, tomorrow, and the next day?
Might we start speaking up?
Might we stop normalizing abnormal things?
Might we change the culture of our industry ourselves?
From within?
Years into the work of trying to make healthcare better—given the industry’s massive size and scale—I believe working from within may be the only way to create meaningful, scaled change.
But it will require a cultural revolution.
We will need to stop defining financial success alone as success.
We will need to see meeting the standards of accreditation, rating, and regulatory bodies as necessary but far from sufficient.
Rather—we will need to define success in common sense terms.
Did we treat people in a way consistent with the Golden Rule that honors their humanity?
Would we want to access our own services as consumers or patients?
Do we apply the best science and knowledge to help others?
Did we offer genuine *care* when the situation demanded it.
We need to take a hard look and ask—Are our actions or work or job deceiptioms part of the solution or part of the problem?
The toxic positivity and uncritical self-absorption in many organizations must give way to a restless, continual drive to be better.
Celebratory healthcare conferences must give way to more truth and less hype.
Leadership must be more authentic and more challenging.
Healthcare needs more war-time solutioning (because we are at war with the a broken system) and less peacetime concilliation.
We are who we have been waiting for.”
Source: Sachin H. Jain/LinkedIn