Abner Mason is a health equity pioneer. A decade ago, he was already championing more equitable access to care for people with low income and low health literacy. In those early days, it was difficult for Mason to get plans and providers to buy into his vision, but he stuck with it. Now his company, SameSky Health, is helping organizations make meaningful progress addressing health equity gaps.
Healthcare IT Today sat down with Mason to get his take on the current state of health equity and to dive deeper into the impact his company is having.
Health Equity Defined
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health equity is achieved when everyone can attain their full potential for health and well-being. The WHO goes on to say that health and health equity are determined by the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, play and age, as well as biological and structural determinants (power and resources).
Discrimination, stereotyping, and prejudice based on age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, income, etc, can affect where people live and work which in turn affects their health. Addressing health equity therefore means dealing with these complex issues.
A key first step is gaining a better understanding of the members and communities served by plans and providers. This means gathering age, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and other information. Once that information is collected, it can be used to identify system biases (which can then be eliminated) and programs developed that will reduce health equity gaps.
This is what Mason realized a decade ago.
Understanding Health Plan Members
“Health plans have always been challenged to know who their members are,” explained Mason. “They have excelled at the actuarial work, collecting premiums, paying claims, and rooting out fraud and abuse. Now plans want to establish a trusted relationship with their members and in order to do that, they need to get to know them better.”
Mason points to the fact that many plans do not know the race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity of their members. Plans also do not know whether a member has food in their refrigerator or not.
“They need to understand all this information about individual members so that they can help direct and navigate that member to the right care at the right time,” continued Mason. “Then they can encourage those members to come in for required screenings that are part of the Medicaid and Medicare Advantage programs.”
The SameSky Health platform combines public data, private data, and claims data to build a more comprehensive view of members. That data is used to engage members and build personalized care journeys for them for that factor in their socio-economic situation.
He recognized that the one-size-fits-all approach used by health plans and healthcare providers was failing people who were already marginalized economically.
“When I started the company 9-10 years ago, it was a real struggle to get health plans and other healthcare stakeholder to talk about what we now call health equity,” said Mason. “In fairness, we weren’t using those terms back then. So it was really hard to get health plans to talk to us. That’s now completely changed. You can go to almost any session at a health conference and hear people talking about health equity. This has been a tailwind for SameSky Health.”
Watch the interview with Abner Mason to find out more about SameSky Health and what he sees as the next priority for health equity.
Learn more about SameSky Health at https://www.sameskyhealth.com/
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