The SCAN Group has named its first chief AI officer as the insurer looks to further advance its strategy around the tech.
Aman Bhandari, Ph.D., most recently served as vice president of data science at Vertex Pharmaceuticals and also played a key role in building the first data science team at Merck. Bhandari also spent time at the White House and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services working in this space.
Bhandari told Fierce Healthcare that his prior experience at regulatory agencies made joining the team at SCAN and departing the biopharma industry for insurance feel like a homecoming. He said working on AI projects in the life sciences space highlighted the potential of this tech in healthcare.
"I had seen it from a medicines perspective, and I thought, I really want to do this now from this other side of healthcare," he said.
In the role, Bhandari will lead SCAN's strategy for enterprise AI and data analytics, with the goal of scaling new AI deployments across the company's operations and care-delivery business.
SCAN is approaching AI with a focus on enabling employees to build and apply AI tools to improve their day-to-day workflows and address challenges they may face in their work. It's with this perspective that Bhandari and the AI team will report to Lindsay Crawley Herbert, SCAN's chief people and transformation officer.
Putting the AI team within human resources highlights the fact that making AI work requires more than just the tech itself—it needs teams that have the skills and embrace the culture necessary to use the technology effectively.
Bhandari said that approaching AI deployment in this way was particularly appealing, as this work is often treated as a "relay race": once one's part is completed, the baton is handed off to the next group, and so on. Instead, it should be treated more like an "orchestra" performance, with each player making their necessary contribution to the end goal.
"We need a lot of people at the table who have very important skill sets to make the orchestra sound the way that it should," he said. "And I think at SCAN, that's exactly what they have."
Work has already been underway at the company for some time to roll out AI tools for its team, SCAN said in anannouncement. For example, SCAN has rolled out call summarization and interactive voice response tools for its member advocates to support those conversations, as well as platforms that can summarize medical charts as part of care transitions.
SCAN CEO Sachin Jain, M.D., said that given SCAN's size, it's critical to bring on the right people to drive innovation forward and keep pace with the larger firms. Coming off an annual enrollment period during which SCAN grew to be one of the 10 largest Medicare Advantage plans in the U.S., the team "wanted to start focusing on scalable infrastructure and architecture."
"We have some very strong players in this space, but I think some of what was missing, frankly, was a mature corporate perspective on how all the pieces should fit together," he said. "I think a lot of what Aman's role is going to be to do is actually focus us."
Jain said that, as Bhandari has worked to build AI infrastructure at multiple organizations before, he's experienced the failures and mistakes that are critical for learning necessary lessons to move forward. That perspective as a guiding force will
Plus, in AI development, there's been no shortage of development that amounts to throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Jain said the team will instead look to plant the seeds that can grow into a foundation the company can lean on for years to come.
"A lot of people talk about 1,000 flowers blooming," Jain said. "They don't talk about 1,000 flowers dying."
In addition to his significant experience in this space, Bhandari said his own health journey spurred his decision to improve healthcare from the inside. Having firsthand experience with some of the biggest challenges patients face made the opportunity here even clearer, he said.
"We'll be experimenting with a bunch of things, but it's really about the outcomes at the end of the day," he said. "And I think that's just important to state that that's very clear about what we are focused on."