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Sachin H Jain: Does “care management” really make a difference?

Sachin Jain/LinkedIn

Apr 16, 2025, 09:46

Sachin H Jain: Does “care management” really make a difference?

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

“Health plans and health systems and a growing number of startups often pride themselves on ‘care management.’

But a few decades into a career in healthcare, it’s increasingly clear that care management means different things to different people.

Some observations:

Good Care Management

– leverages a pre-existing relationship with the patient and feels connected to the clinicians and other health care professionals who are caring for them.

– uses all available data to build a composite view of what is happening with a patient and communicating that view (helping patients feel seen).

– delivers proactive continuous management of needs based on deep knowledge of a patient’s clinical condition.

– allows creative problem solving (‘whatever it takes’) to go above and beyond when needed.

Bad Care Management

– assigns strangers to call strangers,
– fails to use existing data about a patient to inform engagement,
– focuses on regulatory compliance and checking boxes in a check lists,
– delivers episodic engagement by a cast of strangers who are relearning the patient’s situation every time,
– leverages “in the box,” perfunctory thinking that ignores or glosses over complex situations when they don’t fit into a neat category.

Fundamental to the problem of care management is building and scaling a culture of caring that supports and empowers compassionate and skilled care managers to do the real work of helping people rather than documentation for its own sake.

But “caring” is too often constrained by “operations” that fail to enable the flexibility and agency needed to truly demonstrate care.

Does “care management” really make a difference?

Where have you seen “good” or “bad” care management?

What made it good or bad?“