Sachin H. Jain

Sachin H. Jain (born in 1980 in New York City and raised in Alpine, New Jersey) is an American physician who held leadership positions in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).^[1] He is president and chief executive officer of the CareMore Health System after serving as Chief Medical Information and Innovation Officer at Merck and Co.^[2] He is also co-founder and co-Editor-in-Chief of "Healthcare: The Science of Delivery and Innovation," adjunct professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Contributor at Forbes. In 2018, he was named one of American healthcare’s most 100 most influential leaders by Modern Healthcare magazine (#36).

Education

Jain attended high school at the Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology (now part of the Bergen Academies) where he founded the debate team and the Bergen County Leaders Forum and served internships at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; the Office of the Bergen County Executive; and the Bergen County Department of Health Services. He was also a Governor's Scholar on Public Issues and the Future of New Jersey. Jain received his undergraduate degree with high honors in government from Harvard College; his medical degree (MD) from Harvard Medical School; and his master's degree in business administration (MBA) from Harvard Business School. At Harvard College, he was mentored by health care quality guru Donald Berwick and studied under Christopher Winship, Robert Putnam, Deborah Stone, and William Julius Wilson. At Harvard Business School, he conducted independent study with Michael E. Porter and received The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans and the Dean's Award, one of the school's highest honors for service to society.^[3] At Harvard Medical School, he was president of his class and awarded the Henry Asbury Christian Award for research excellence. He and classmate Kiran Kakarala were advised by health policy department chair Barbara McNeil and received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant support from the Commonwealth Fund to build ImproveHealthCare, an initiative to drive incorporation of healthcare policy into medical school curricula that scaled to 17 US medical schools.

Early work

Jain completed his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, but had been granted a two-year leave mid-residency to pursue government service.^[4] He is a founder of several non-profit health care ventures including the Homeless Health Clinic at UniLu;^[5] the Harvard Bone Marrow Initiative,^[6] the South Asian Healthcare Leadership Forum (SAHLF), and the South Asian Men's Collective. He worked with DaVita-Bridge of Life to bring charity dialysis care to rural Rajasthan, India^[7] and Medical Missions for Children to bring cleft lip and palate surgery to the region through partnership with International Human Benefit Services Trust.

While in residency, he was a member of the faculty ^[8] of Harvard Business School's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness and worked with professors Michael Porter and Jim Yong Kim to build the emerging field of health care delivery science. He served as an expert consultant to the World Health Organization.^[9] He later partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Amol Navathe and the publisher Elsevier to launch the field’s charter journal, Healthcare: the Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation.^[10][11] He also collaborated with Brigham internal medicine residency and Harvard Business School leadership to create the first joint Internal Medicine Residency-MBA, the John McArthur Program in Medicine and Management.^[12] He was awarded the resident-mentor award in recognition of mentoring skill and leadership.

Early in his career Jain served internships at McKinsey & Co, WellPoint, Inc., the Alpha Center for Health Policy, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He was also appointed a lecturer in health policy at Havard Medical School from 2012-2015. He has been invited to serve as guest faculty or as a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Minnesota, the University of Virginia's Darden School, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, and the University of Southern California.

Government service

In 2009, Jain joined the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)^[13] as special assistant to David Blumenthal when he was national coordinator for health information technology. Jain worked with Blumenthal to implement the HITECH Provisions of the Recovery Act and to achieve broader alignment between health plans and federal meaningful use policies. He was also tasked with devising strategies to enhance electronic health record usability and ^[14] organize private sector engagement efforts on behalf of ONC.^[15]

Jain was recruited by his college mentor Donald Berwick as a senior advisor to the administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and was asked to help lead the launch of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) that was chartered by Section 3021 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He served briefly as its deputy director for policy and programs under Richard Gilfillan, the center’s first director.^[16] His optimistic perspective on the Center's capacity to reform payment for health care services^[17] was met with skepticism from some critics.^[18] Jain advocated within the administrator's office for speedier translation of health care delivery research into practice; an enhanced diabetes prevention benefit; and an expanded use of clinical registries.^[19]

Merck

In 2012, Jain was appointed global Chief Medical Information and Innovation Officer of Merck. At Merck, Jain built and led the company's digital health and big data group, Merck Medical Information and Innovation (M2I2); he also continued to practice medicine on the Harvard faculty of the Boston Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center. The Merck group launched 14 partnerships with industry and academic partners around the world including the Regenstrief Institute, Harvard University, PracticeFusion, and Israel’s Maccabi. Notably, it led one of the most successful demonstrations of clinical decision support to enhance vaccine prescribing rates and also of an academic real word data partnership to demonstrate the safety of a controversial medicine. The group was subsumed into other groups when Jain left the company for CareMore.

CareMore

In 2015, Jain joined the CareMore Health System, an integrated health plan and delivery system in 10 states that is headquartered in Los Angeles. CareMore was founded in 1993, but rose to national prominence for its model managing chronic disease and complex patients after it was acquired by Anthem, Inc (then WellPoint) and it was featured in a 2011 cover story in the Atlantic Monthly. Jain has overseen the diversification of the company to serve both Medicare Advantage and Medicaid patients, as well as to enable other health system (i.e. Emory Healthcare) to implement the CareMore model for population health management. Jain has recruited a number of new physician leaders from across the country and maintains a blog on Forbes.com which often features observations from his work at CareMore. CareMore is consistently regarded in national policy circles as a model for how to better manage high-cost, vulnerable populations to improve health outcomes and lower costs. Under Jain’s leadership, CareMore has gained recognition for its work to reduce social isolation and loneliness among its patient base. Jain maintains a faculty appointment as an adjunct professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine; is board-certified in internal medicine and continues to see patients clinically at CareMore.

Writings

Jain has authored more than 100 publications on health care delivery innovation and health care reform. His article, "Practicing Medicine in the Age of Facebook," in the New England Journal of Medicine explores the interface between social media and the practice of clinical medicine.^[20] He coined the term digital phenotype and described it in a paper in Nature Biotechnology with colleagues Brian Powers, Jared Hawkins, and John Brownstein. Two of his articles in Journal of the American Medical Association, "Societal Perspectives on Physicians: Knights, Knaves, and Pawns?"^[21] (with Christine K. Cassel) and "Are Patients Knights, Knaves, and Pawn?"^[22] (with John Rother) build on the social theories of Julien LeGrand and apply them to physician and patient motivations. The book he co-edited with Susan Pories and Gordon Harper, "The Soul of a Doctor" has received mixed reviews.^[23] His article, "The Racist Patient," was mentioned in the New York Times and generated controversy about the obligation of physicians to patients with racist attitudes towards them and critical comments directed at Jain's perspective.^[24]

Honors

Jain is the subject of a Harvard Business School case study written by dean Nitin Nohria.^[25] Jain has been named a New England Journal of Medicine group Fascinating Physician and was selected to Boston Business Journal's Top 40 under 40 list,^[26] Modern Healthcare's Up and Comer list, and National Minority Quality Forum 40 under 40. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and an Aspen Institute Health Innovators Fellow. He has been elected to the board of directors of the Harvard Alumni Association and the Los Angeles Red Cross. He has been named to Becker’s Hospital Review’s Rising Stars in Healthcare. When he was a physician in the Veteran’s Administration, he was awarded a Golden Heart Award for exceptional care of a veteran. He is a member of the Los Angeles selection committee for the White House Fellows. In 2017, he was named to Modern Healthcare’s list of top 50 (#23) physician executives. In 2018, he was named one of the Top 25 Minority Executives in Healthcare by the same publication and top 100 most influential people in healthcare (#36).

References

External links

• Official website
• Profile of Sachin Jain from Harvard Magazine
• Profile from Harvard Medical School Annual Report
• Harvard Business School Class of 2007 Profiles
• Bio from World Healthcare Congress