Kang-Xing Jin: Head of Health at Facebook (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis chief Medical Officer Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government and they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well.

I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Sh.

And today on RA line, I'm really happy to be joined by KX JK X is the head of health at Facebook and has been leading their COVID-19 response.

He has worked on developing health related products like a blood donation tool and health support groups as well as how to stem the spread of misinformation about the Coronavirus on Facebook's platforms.

K was also uh Harvard 2006. He was in Elliott House and we both were in engineering.

I was Mather 2010. So I missed him by a couple of years.

I would love to hear more about your background in your own words and the career trajectory that ultimately led you to becoming head of health at Facebook.

I joined right out of school. Actually, I did computer science and psychology at Harvard.

Uh, graduated in 06. I joined as a software engineer and, uh, you know, this interest in like the intersection of, you know, human connection, uh, and health has been something I've been thinking about for a while.

Uh, and then in my time in Facebook app, um, uh, we're just seeing more and more and hearing more and more people uh using uh our products to meet health related needs.

And uh we're hearing from folks that this is often uh one of the most important uh uh uh things for them. And, you know, whether it's like connecting with other people who are going through similar uh challenges or connecting with a doctor or helping, you know, helping someone find a blood donor for, for their parent.

Uh We were consistently hearing that this is something that people were, were doing and um, II just felt like we had uh a responsibility to, to better support some of these needs and an opportunity to better support some of these needs.

So this has been building for quite some time, uh since about 2018 now and uh uh made the transition and I'm uh really grateful that uh uh I have the opportunity to work on some of these challenges every day.

You know, what advice would you give to someone who's considering a career in health care? And could, could be, as a clinician, could be as a health informaticist.

I would love to hear what advice you would give to our audience. Yeah.

My heart care is out to a lot of the younger people here in college or, or, or so on who are just getting started uh in their career at this time.

Yeah. At least for me it was hard enough to navigate the process and figure things out outside of the context of a global endemic and you know how that's I think disrupted a lot of things, one of the things for me and this took me a while to, to, to realize is um kind of getting clarity on what like I really valued and what I felt was like more like the most meaningful thing for me.

Cause I think that actually helped me like, ultimately ground, you know, the direction I chose to, to go professionally and, and, you know, taking this role about 22 years ago, it's something I'm uh really grateful I did.

And, you know, it's easier to like, explain it now, but certainly at the time, it was uh it took a lot of reflection and I think like my main takeaway from that was uh getting grounded on, like for me just being able to work on a, a space uh that, that has a lot of personal uh meaning to me is something I and grateful for.

But also uh has has been really helpful for me professionally. Thanks for watching this preview of Raised Line to hear the full interview, check out all of our podcasts and subscribe to the series.

Please go to osmosis.org/raised Line podcast or listen wherever you get your podcasts.