Opinion

Sachin H. Jain: Less hollow happy talk, I wonder though what would happen if instead of adding more layers we refocused on empowering and financing clinicians to do more of what is needed for patients themselves?

Photo from Sachin H. Jain/Linkedin

Aug 20, 2023, 16:23

Sachin H. Jain: Less hollow happy talk, I wonder though what would happen if instead of adding more layers we refocused on empowering and financing clinicians to do more of what is needed for patients themselves?

Sachin Jain, the President and the CEO of SCAN Group & Health Plan, recently posted on LinkedIn:

“American healthcare has become dominated by middle-ware companies whose services provide uncertain value.
The vision of the doctor-patient relationship at the center is a quaint one—with an endless array of intermediary solutions that now interject themselves.
We often soothe our doubts about them by labeling these interjecting solutions ‘innovation.’

I wonder though what would happen if—instead of adding more layers (more layers that don’t meaningfully connect and interact with one another)—we refocused on empowering and financing clinicians to do more of what is needed for patients themselves?
What would happen if we stopped trying to “wrap around” and instead focused on truly strengthening the physician-patient relationship?

Could we return to a system where:
Patients had same-day access to a doctor who knows them?
Everyone involved in the care of the patient was communicating regularly and on the same page about their care?
More time was spent supporting people through their most difficult moments than in the course of documenting care and requesting authorizations?

Simple aspirations. None as complicated as putting a man on the moon. But perplexingly seemingly more difficulty.
I use the word “return” because we used to have it. And then we lost it. And now we are trying to fix it with middle-ware and the middle-ware is making it all worse.
I think we can—but it will require more brutal truths. More acknowledgement of failure. More acknowledgement that we are all complicit in building a Frankenstein health system—pieced together inelegantly and prone to malfunction.

Less hollow happy talk.
It will be that acknowledgement, that truth—that will set us free to do the work that must be done.”

Source: Sachin H. Jain/LinkedIn