Dr Sachin Jain: Taking Care of Patients in the Context of Their Lives

The future of healthcare should be taking care of patients in the context of their lives, whether that is addressing their hunger, transportation needs, or loneliness, explained Sachin H. Jain, MD, MBA, president and CEO of CareMore.

Transcript

What does the future of healthcare look like in your ideal world?

In my ideal world the future of healthcare looks like us actually taking care of the whole patient. And people say that all the time, but one of the challenges that I've had as a physician is that when you don't have a tool to actually give to a patient to actually solve their problem, we don't usually ask about it. So in my world we have solutions for the problems that most affect that patients we take care of, like loneliness.

So we're actually building a loneliness program at CareMore, where we're actually providing patients who are the most lonely with regular phone calls, as well as friendly visitors to their homes, to actually address their social context. If a patient is hungry, we are able to somehow connect them to community resources to get them food.

So I think the healthcare system of the future actually takes care of the whole patient in the context of their lives, not just in the context of their individual medical encounters. It's one of the reasons that CareMore, for years, has provided seniors with transportation, as it's well known that as seniors age they become less able to drive. And if a patient is not comfortable driving to a medical office appointment, the changes that they're going to end up in the hospital with what could have been an avoidable complication is very high.

So we're a system that fundamentally embraces taking care of the whole patient and that's what we're about in aggregate.