Loneliness: It’s hurting us. Dr. Sachin Jain, President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, has been talking about and treating the scourge of loneliness for years. Now he discusses this with Gaurav Rohatgi on the latest episode of The Resonance Test. Jain reveals the roots of his obsession: It started with an undergraduate course with Robert Putnam and his book Bowling Alone, which “showed us all the importance of social connection to social outcomes.” The dialogue ventures into the world of social media (“We’ve substituted a lot of community participation with online connection”) and COVID (a friend of Jain’s said about the pandemic: "I’ve spent more time with my son in the last six months than I had in the previous five years of his life”). Jain recalls his Togetherness Program at CareMore, in which “small nudges ultimately translated into fewer admissions and better health outcomes for the people who were part of the program” and covers his recent work at SCAN: “We employ a number of our senior citizen members to make regular outreach phone calls to fellow members.” It’s a fascinating and occasionally paradoxical conversion. Jain says that loneliness “is not a complicated problem to solve,” while at the same time maintaining that “This isn’t simple work—it’s simple on the surface but it’s quite meaningful and quite emotionally complicated when you actually dig into it.” We suspect you’ll dig it a lot.
Host: Kenji Ross
Editor: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon
About the Author
Gaurav RohatgiPRINCIPALGaurav is passionate about developing technologies and products that improve people’s lives. He has deep experience in life science R&D, clinical and consumer medical products. He discovers technical or business strengths and risks within the supply chain of a fast-moving project and architects and orchestrates valuable solutions.
At Continuum, Gaurav has made significant contributions to hundreds of projects across various industries. He led the development of microfluidic platforms for culture and perfusion of micro physiological systems, an appliance for the destruction of regulated medical waste, a medical ICU monitor, and pre-packed chromatography columns for drug discovery and manufacture.
Gaurav is a named inventor on over 15 patents and applications. He co-invented and led the development of the low-cost drive system in Insulet’s OmniPod insulin management system to its successful 510k clinical trial. He holds MS and BS degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT.
Ken GordonChief Communications SpecialistKen makes EPAM Continuum’s work visible to the necessary people. He creates superlative content, works with colleagues to do the same, and employs social networks to share it widely.
A card-carrying humanist, Ken co-founded QuickMuse, the improvisational writing website, and JEDLAB, the Jewish education community. He has written for TheAtlantic.com, the New York Times, and many other pubs.
Ken has an English degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MA in English from the State University of New York at Albany. He framed both diplomas long ago, but can’t seem to find them now—a fact he considers all-too-human.
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