BY JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH
Healthcare needs to move into 2022 and get away from the one-size-fits-all approach that healthcare takes almost everywhere and, instead, treat people like who they are matters.” That’s the challenge coming from SameSky Health’s founder & CEO Abner Mason whose business is helping some of healthcare’s most notorious “one-size-fits-all-ers” (health plans) improve the way they engage with diverse populations.
SameSky has built a proprietary tech platform that creates an ‘n of 1’ approach to member engagement that is focused on using data to understand who each individual member is at a “cultural” level which, as Abner defines it, is not just about ethnicity or race, but about ALL the factors that go into how a person makes a decision about whether or not to seek care, where to get that care, and who they ultimately trust to deliver it.
You can call it “micro-targeting-at-scale” and Abner compares it to the way Netflix customizes movie recommendations based on what it learns about its users. SameSky is hoping to achieve the same level of consumer-focused customization among Medicaid populations, and is working with some of the biggest names in the biz (UnitedHealthcare, Anthem, Humana and others) to tailor an annual “journey” to each member that helps members build trust with their plan, helps the plan get to know their members, and, in the end, helps both the plan AND the member satisfy mutual needs when it comes to getting things like annual health screenings done.
Will we eventually get to a more equitable and personally-tailored healthcare system? Stick around until the last few minutes to hear what Abner finds exciting about some of the new federal regulations that impact health data collection and what he sees as their big-picture impact on the future of health equity. PLUS, a bonus for all those who may have been wondering: What prompted the name change to SameSky Health from ConsejoSano?? Is this REALLY because Matthew Holt could never pronounce it? The shocking backstory is revealed!
