Don't Force It: How to Get into College without Losing Yourself in the Process

Sachin Jain: Threading Values, Interests, and Expectations

• Sheila Akbar, PhD

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In today's episode, I sit down with Sachin Jain, an old friend and very successful CEO of a healthcare company. We discuss how he integrated his interests in social justice and policy with his family’s encouragement to pursue medicine, his ideas on mentorship, and the arc of his career.

Bio

Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA is CEO of SCAN Group and SCAN Health Plan, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit Medicare Advantage plans, which serves more than 300,000 members across California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico.
 
Previously, Dr. Jain was President and CEO of CareMore and Aspire Health, which served 200,000 Medicare and Medicaid patients in 32 states. He also served as Chief Medical Information & Innovation Officer at Merck & Co., was Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and was the first Deputy Director for policy and programs at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI).
Dr. Jain graduated from Harvard College and earned his MD from Harvard Medical School and MBA from Harvard Business School. He is Adjunct Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and is a member of the boards of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Omada Health, Advantage Healthcare Services, and The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. Follow Sachin on LinkedIn.

Access free resources and learn more about Sheila and her team at Signet Education at signeteducation.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilaakbar/.

Sachin Jain:

I had wandered into a class. It was called gen ed 186 it's called quality of healthcare in America, and it was taught by two giants in the field, a guy named Don Berwick and Howard Hyatt. And they invited all their friends, and they all gave guest lectures. And it was people who were all working on issues at the intersection of healthcare policy, quality, access, disparities, all topics that felt really interesting and felt like both big and small at the same time, and that's kind of how I developed my career vision.

Sheila Akbar:

Well, hi folks. Welcome back to the podcast. It is mid October, and I hope everybody is thriving and surviving whatever it is you're up against. For many of the families that I'm talking to, it's those early deadlines that are about two weeks away, but I know that students who are not in the college process, maybe thinking about midterms, maybe feeling like, oh gosh, we really need a break, because we go for so long in fall without a long weekend or a break, we just march on through into the winter to the holidays. So I hope that you are taking care of yourself. And this is going to be a lame segue, but I'm gonna say it anyway. On the topic of care, I invited a really good and old friend of mine, Sachin Jane, to join us on the podcast today. Sachin is the CEO of scan, which is a healthcare company based here in California, and Sachin and I met on the first night I moved into college, we've known each other for a long time, and it's been amazing to watch his career journey and all of the wonderful things he's been able to do in communities he's been able to impact. So I was excited to have him on today to talk about his sense of purpose and what's motivated him to combine all the things that he's done, which include healthcare, policy and political work and business, he's put it together in a way that makes a lot of sense now, on the outside looking in, but I know that, like many of us, while he was going through it, he was just taking The next best step that he could see. Sachin is also an amazing mentor, and has talked a lot about the power of mentorship in his life, so I'm excited for you to hear a little bit more about that. Take a listen, Sachin. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to spend some time reminiscing a little bit, and I'm sure I'm going to learn things about you that I didn't really know, and our audience is really going to learn a lot.

Sachin Jain:

Sheila, it's a pleasure, and thanks so much for having me.

Sheila Akbar:

Ofcourse, I'm glad you're able to fit me into your very busy schedule. So let's start by talking about what you do now, and then we're going to back up and retrace that journey.

Sachin Jain:

Yeah, so I lead Scan Group and Scan Health Plan. Scan is not a radiology company, despite what most people think. It's actually an acronym for Senior Care Action Network, which is a diversified healthcare company that was founded in 1977 by a group of people we affectionately call the 12 Angry seniors. And this is a group of community activists who wanted to change the face of aging in Long Beach, California, and some 47 years later, we now serve over 300,000 patients through health plans, through medical groups. And you know, it's honestly a real honor to be doing this work. You know, I got interested in aging and aging policy when I was an undergraduate student, when we were classmates at Harvard, Sheila, and it's been a thread that I've followed since then, you know, I've had roles that have spanned government, business and pharmaceutical sector, you know, the managed care sector, the practice of clinical medicine. And just really enjoy what I'm doing. But I'm like, like a lot of folks, I'm always thinking about how, how can I have a bigger impact? And so it's fun to reflect on the past as we think about the future.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, and I want to note, we discovered not too long ago that my mother in law is on a scan plan, and then we have been very happy with with the care that

Sachin Jain:

Good. I'm so glad to hear it. And if ever that changes, call me.

Sheila Akbar:

I know who to call.

Sachin Jain:

Yeah, no, I think your mother in law is a member of Scan Embrace, which is actually a new model we started in the last couple of years, which actually provides facility based care to people who are in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. The care literally actually comes to you. And a lot of people don't know that programs like this exist, but it's a really cool program. I think a nurse practitioner hopefully visits her at least once a week, just to check up on her, see how she's doing, keep her out of the hospital. So I'm really glad that she's a member.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, thanks. All right, so let's, let's go back in time. Now I know you grew up in New Jersey, just outside of New York City. Take us back to your high school days, because I know a bunch of people you went to high school with, and it sounded pretty intense. What was that environment like?

Sachin Jain:

Well, I was in the third graduating class of a school that sounds more intimidating than it actually was. It was called the Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology. Today it's one of the sub schools at a larger institution called the Bergen County Academies. And it was a startup. It was literally a startup. And I was in a class of 60 students. 58 of us ended up graduating, and we were a school that was focused on math, science and technology. So we had chemistry, physics and biology every year for three years, instead of having one year of each, we had a math curriculum that was more focused on math competitions than it was on kind of traditional mathematics. And as a result, we had one of the top math teams in the country, and still do. And we had an extended school day and an extended school year. So we started at 8am we ended at 430 every day. By the time the bus picked you up at seven, you were home by like five, 530 so you were working a pretty long day. And then we also had this extended school year. So New Jersey, most school starts after Labor Day, and we started August 15 every year. And remarkably, some of us just realized that it was the 30th anniversary of just starting high school. And that applies to you too. Sheila, unfortunately. And you know that that was just like last month. And so think about that time a lot. The other kind of big difference at the school is that it had a project based curriculum. So there was a philosophy that was very progressive, even at that time, that actually kind of how you learn was more important than what you learned. And so there was a lot of focus at the time of what we would now call deep work, intensive, project based work, which honestly, I think, really spurred a high degree of creativity, because we weren't necessarily churning through a curriculum. We were given a broad task, and every quarter or every trimester, we actually called it at the time, every trimester we had a project, and we worked in groups. And so this idea of like working groups to accomplish big goals, was something that was taught to us, literally from the age of 13, is how old we were when we when we started. And so again, I think it's really shaped how I think about work, how I think about people, really understanding human motivations and group dynamics from a very early stage. You know, there were some weaknesses to being in a startup School, which is like we were all just figuring it out, which felt really stressful at the time, in a lot of ways at the same time, I think it actually prepares you really well for the kind of ambiguity that we all experience in everyday life, because not everything is going to be like structured perfectly to the hilt. And so I think it actually prepared me well to come to college and kind of dive into the more freeform environment with a little bit more deliberateness and a little bit more purpose that I might have had had I gone to a more traditional environment.

Sheila Akbar:

It does sound just as intense as that name made it sound what you think was not, but I do remember you were

Sachin Jain:

Well, I think it's because we had a classmate, Shankar Duraswamy, who, every time we ran into each other, would be, would ask me, How have you advanced science and technology today? And the truth is, is that I'm not sure we did a lot of advancing science and technology, but what we did was, think we we learned a lot. And, you know, actually, we developed a lot of good, durable relationships, which I think is pretty unique for competitive high schools like that.

Sheila Akbar:

But I do remember feeling like you, you just mentioned that your schooling gave you a really good understanding of group group dynamics, and I remember like, clocking that in you very early, like, Oh, this guy knows how to work a crowd. Okay, so let's maybe speed through time a little bit. You're at Harvard. Tell me how you're figuring out what you want to do. Or did you always know?

Sachin Jain:

No, I mean, look, I went to Harvard. I was, like, really interested in government, public policy. I actually kind of went home. I remember this very clearly. You know, as a freshman, it's probably Thanksgiving, or one of the other early holidays. And I went home to my dad, and I said, Dad, dad, who's an immigrant physician, Father, like, like, yours from India, said to me, how's it going? And I said, great, Dad. I'm really interested in maybe, like, going to law school. I think there's, like, a lot of really interesting work to do in the law my dad said, you know, you really should go to law school after you go to medical school, an MD and a JD is a great combination, at which point I realized that there were two career possibilities for me. One was I could be a doctor or I could be a physician. That is, of course, if I wanted my parents approval, which at that time in life really, really mattered. And so, you know, continue to take pre med classes, but wasn't really sure how I was going to put it together with my broader interest in public policy, which I also got from my dad, because we grew up watching the the nightly news every day. And so it was actually I wandered into a class. It was called gen ed 186 it's called quality of healthcare in America, and it was taught by two giants in the. Old a guy named Don Berwick and Howard Hyatt, and they invited all their friends, and they all gave guest lectures. And it was people who were all working on issues at the intersection of healthcare policy, quality, access, disparities, all topics that felt really interesting and felt like both big and small at the same time. And that's kind of how I developed my career vision and ended up staying at Harvard for medical school, business school. That's a whole other story. For my residency. And so had this really rich number of years within the Harvard system, training to be a doctor and a physician leader.

Sheila Akbar:

And how would you say that thread of you mentioned earlier of aging, how we treat elders in our society and these ideas of equity in healthcare, access to healthcare. How did they intersect? And how did you see them as both influencing and influenced by your values?

Sachin Jain:

Yeah, no, thanks. You know, I think I think about the movie Slumdog Millionaire a lot, not, not because of anything particular about the movie, but the cinematic style, like was like, there's like, you flashback to this moment, and it was like this moment that you learned something. So the first time I became aware of like disparities, I was reading like, an article in India today, which is like a magazine that used to get delivered to our house. And it was an article about, like, the HIV epidemic in India, and how it really spread through truck drivers and and prostitutes, and how that would like spread into people's homes from some of the behaviors of the truck drivers interacting with prostitutes and I, and I just felt this like deep sense of injustice. It was the first time I experienced like injustice in healthcare. I was like these poor women who are just like, trying to take care of their families or getting infected with this untreatable disease for which we now are starting to have treatments, but they have, like, no access to it. And I was like, holy cow. And I felt such a deep connection, because my family had this deep connection in India. I was like, you know, that could have been us, that could have been my mom, or that could have been our family. Had a few different things happened in the course of our family's history. So that kind of was, like the first time I experienced it. And then I think there's this other thing that happens when you're kind of an Indian American growing up in this society, and I haven't talked about this very much, but I feel very comfortable talking with you about it, which is, you know, when you're young, you can either kind of think about yourself as white or black. And I will tell you, like, when you're young and you're being treated differently by kids who are mean in a playground, and you're a predominantly Caucasian community, you know, there's a thing that happens, which is you start, like, reading a lot of Martin Luther King, and you start reading a lot of Malcolm X, and you take the civil rights movement, and it takes on an importance for you and I never seen this kind of I'd never known that other people experienced this until I read a book written by one of our kind of classmates, Michelle quo, who wrote a book called reading with Patrick, and she talked about being a young person like reading, like consuming African American literature and feeling a connection to it. And like that was my academic trajectory. So like my senior thesis. I'm not sure if you know this, but my senior thesis was about the black church in Boston and its role in managing community police relationships. And that was like the research that I did all my undergrad. I wasn't working in a lab. I was working on these broader issues of race, religion, social justice, because, like, I felt this connection to this, these themes, and then so when I became a healthcare leader, part from the push of my dad, in part because I developed my own native interest in these topics, like these questions about equity, racism, disparities, like we're front and center. I'd say my feelings about how to address them have changed over time, but scans been at the forefront of we launched the first LGBTQ plus health plan in the country. We launched the first women's focus health plan in the country. We launched, we're just launching, right now, an Asian focused health plan product for people in Southern California. So it's interesting to see how all these things come together. And it may have started with this one article that I read my senior year of high school as I was thinking about the HIV epidemic in India, right?

Sheila Akbar:

That's amazing.

Sachin Jain:

Yeah.

Sheila Akbar:

Well, you also, you skipped straight ahead to scan but you also worked in the Obama administration.

Sachin Jain:

I did, I did, you know, again, I think when you're interested in changing healthcare in a particular time in history, the one thing you dreamed about was universal access. You're like, everyone should have access to healthcare. And President Obama was elected the closest thing we've ever had to a mandate to actually get everyone covered. Now people can argue about whether it did in the right way and whether it kind of had some unintended consequences, but he was America's healthcare president, and when he was elected, a lot of my former mentors and professors were rumored to be going down to work in the Obama administration. And I said, I'm going to go and I'm going to join so I asked many of my Harvard professors, like, Hey, if you go down, like, I'd love to come with you. And the first person who gave me a call was a guy named David Blumenthal. So I worked on the High Tech Act, which was the part of the Recovery Act that got doctors and hospitals electronic health records. And. And then I worked at CMS during the implementation of the Affordable Care Act on the creation of a new agency called the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. So again, a lot of gambles and risk taking. This was all done during a leave from residency. You know, things that South Asian parents don't necessarily love. My mom even made my residency program director write me a letter saying he would take me back after I had finished my time in government. What she was happy to do. He was kind of amused that she asked for it. But these are, you know, these are kind of a fun, fun little asterisk to the personal story.

Sheila Akbar:

I am learning so much about you, and I love it. You know, I'm not surprised by any of it, but it's really great to hear the little details. I guess I want to hear a little bit more about how your family reacted to these particular things that you grew so passionate about, and how, I mean, you just told us how your mom made your supervisor essentially right that they would take you back after you left to go work in the Obama administration. I think most people having their son go work for the President would be like, great, you made it. Not like, Okay, you do this little detour, but let's get back on the path, you know, of.

Sachin Jain:

Yeah, look, look, my mom, my mom, to this day, says, wouldn't you just be happier going, you know, if you were just a doctor? And she also, and I don't know, maybe I would be. She also says, you know, did you need to do all the things you needed to do to do what you're doing right now. And I think it's really hard for immigrants of a particular generation to really understand that there's more than three jobs and that there's more than you know, those more than a few ways to actually use what we learn along the way, to actually contribute and give back and make a difference. I think she gets it deeply, instinctually. I think she gets it. But I would say there were various times at which their view of a conventional career path clashed with mine. Like there was a question of, like, all these breaks that I took, like, I took a break to do an MBA, I took a break to do to do my time in government, but at the same time, I think one of the things about being an American and, you know, having all these amazing paths available to you is that the previous generation doesn't really know how to guide you. You know, the world has changed so much we're in, like, hyper change right now, and so some of the paradigms that applied to me and you just don't apply anymore. So I don't give any specific advice to anyone about doing anything. And I also think that people who give self referential advice, like, oh, first do this, and then do that, and then are all full of it, because careers are more organic and like unexpected than than deliberate or planned. You know, there's certainly some amount of deliberateness and planning. But if, if you and I, like, we're talking to each other on the steps of Widener, like, you know, 20 years ago, hey, what do you see yourself more than 20 years ago? Where do you see yourself? You know, in the year 2024 I don't think either of us would think we'd be living in Long Beach, California, doing a podcast, me sitting at scan, you sitting at Signet. I don't think we could have imagined that. And I think that that's something that's hard for our parents generation to have fathomed, right?

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, well, I think it's hard to fathom because these, whatever my role is, didn't exist in their world. So how do you imagine something that didn't even exist? But also because it is, you know, a way to think through uncertainty with, I guess, a sense of possibility and abundance, as opposed to scarcity, which, as immigrants, that's what they dealt with, right? Even though our parents came in with education and opportunities, it was still really rough going.

Sachin Jain:

totally and they were the risk takers. And the question is, like, what I find so interesting about some of their advice and counsel is, like, these people took enormous risks. They, like, literally, picked up, moved across the globe, didn't know the language all that well, didn't know the people all that well. Didn't know anyone, actually. And then, like, planted roots, and then they want you and me to play it super safe. I find it all kind of really interesting. But on deeper reflection, I think part of it is they, like, got to as far as they could go. And they're like, Oh, well, if only I had had X, Y or Z. And then they're living vicariously through us, and they're saying, oh, beta Sheila Sachin, do this more. And then, like, the next thing we you know, you would then be able to live the dreams that I didn't like get to live. And so again, I think it's natural, and it's part of every immigrant community story. But I just, I always take a little bit pause at like, you know, how much risk they took and then how little they want us to take. The one thing I'll just say about it that I think is also really interesting is my dad's sense, like the this is the thing that's blown my mind the most in the last five years. Actually, I would say, especially since my dad passed last fall, Sheila is the fact that he said he worked too much. This one actually like my head. My head explodes every time I think about this conversation I had with my dad the first month of the pandemic, where I said dad would now that you're you've kind of lived your life like, what would you have done differently? He's like, I would have spent more time with you and you kids. And your mom and I used to work so much, and I don't know why. And like, my dad is like, the model of work ethic and provider and like, do as much as you can and make the most of every day. And now here's this guy saying at the end of it all, like, Hey, I probably did too much and I should have spent more time. I mean, I think that's crazy.

Sheila Akbar:

I know. I know. I mean, I'm having the same experience with my dad, who's like, I work too hard. Don't work so hard. But then, I mean, it's just totally the opposite message that we got all of our lives, is I'm not working hard enough. You better work harder.

Sachin Jain:

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Sheila Akbar:

Well, the thing I was gonna say is, the whole reason they took that risk, they took that big swing, and came to this country and worked as hard as they did was to give us opportunities, and it's almost as if they don't want us to take those opportunities.

Sachin Jain:

Yeah, no, I completely agree, but I think, and I like and I just have all this ambivalence, honestly, Sheila, when I think about it's like when I moved to California 10 years ago, it was really hard. I was super well settled in Boston. I'd been there for 16 years. Had this great new opportunity to run care more, which is a company I led before scan. And I called my dad, and I said, Dad, how did you do it? I'm having trouble moving to California and I can get home, you know, in six hours, which is the same as a long drive for most people. How did you do it? And he said, Son, sometimes you have to turn your heart to stone. And I think they did that. And I think about if I had to relive the last 1015, 20 years, maybe I would have made different choices. Maybe I would have taken those jobs that would have taken me back to New Jersey, and I would have lived down the street from my dad the way that my my brothers have, but at the same time, like I knew that he was so proud of me for having taken these chances and made these leaps. So I think the life of an immigrant of our parents' generation, and by extension, our generation, is one of, like, just super ambivalence about everything we do. It's like the same, like, I have ambivalence about having gone to Harvard, even though I loved it, and we got a lot of experience, and we got a lot of great experience from it. I have ambivalence about almost every choice I made, just because there is another world where maybe like that sort of, I think my dad would have called it Maya like, the maya of of like American life, the maya of achievement, like all these things take on all the significance, which is why I find the work that you're doing Sheila with high school students and parents and trying to get people more grounded in meaning and purpose early, even as they're doing something as transactional and non purpose filled as applying to college, right, right. Yeah, right, right. But I think that you guys are doing a real service to young people, because I think the earlier you engage these questions, the more meaningful a life that you're going to get to live, and maybe the less therapy you'll do later in life.

Sheila Akbar:

Right, maybe, yeah, well, I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Well, I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but I do want to ask you, I guess, one question, because I know mentorship has been extremely important to you as it has to me, and I know that you pay it forward by mentoring others. What do you think is the I don't want to ask you the best advice, but like, what are your grounding principles in your mentorship of others?

Sachin Jain:

So first of all, I think there's like, variety of different kinds of mentorship. And I think there's people who are like, not all mentors are meant for all people. And what I'll just tell you is like, I'm the kind of mentor. Like, if you want the truth, or my version of the truth, you want direct, you want clear, you want full alignment, but that's going to come with a lot of feedback and a lot of kind of that. I'm your mentor, but I think the truth is, is that not everyone's ready to receive that kind of mentorship. The other part of mentorship, other two observations I'll share about mentorship, is, number one, in any relationship, you always want to give more than you take. You take. You always want to think about that framework. And I think sometimes people enter, enter into mentorship, thinking that it's going to be like a take, take, take, cake, like, Hey, how can you know such and help me get to my goals? Or, how come, how can Sheila get, help me get to my goals, as opposed to looking for that connection and that like genuine relationship building, which comes to the third point, which is this idea of reverse mentorship, which is like, eventually the mentee should become the mentor. And I have got a number of relationships where that's happened, and it's just so awesome when that flip happens and you the relationship becomes reciprocal. So I would just tell anybody who's like, interested in developing true mentoring relationships, is just look for the flip look for the ways you can provide support and guidance, even if you don't think you can that probably the reality is you can. Everybody can get better at their craft. And even though some of these folks have either worked for me or worked with me or whatever it is like, they are my gurus in the same way that I hopefully am contributing to their learning and development.

Sheila Akbar:

I love that, Sachin. Well, thank you so much for visiting with me. And,

Sachin Jain:

Of course

Sheila Akbar:

Reminiscing a little bit. There's so much more that I want to talk to you about, so I will definitely.

Sachin Jain:

I'd love to come back. I'd love to come back.

Sheila Akbar:

All right, thank you. So we had to cut our conversations short. Sachin and I have so much to talk about, and so much of his. Story resonates with me, and I know will resonate with some of you as well. So I'll continue to share kind of nuggets from our continuing conversation as we go forward, and hopefully have him back on the podcast at another time, but I do hope that you'll follow section on LinkedIn. He has a really interesting, I think, unique and authentic style in his LinkedIn posts, where he is really telling authentic stories and anecdotes from his life, with mentors, with his family, with professors, from academics, from business, from all different areas of his life, and they're really interesting to read, and always end with a very impactful lesson. So I hope that you will check that out and start to follow his work, because he's doing really amazing things. Okay, folks, I'm going to leave it there, but we'll see you next week. Thanks again.