Under the Same Sky with GroundGame.Health
Our live Under the Same Sky discussion series featured Susan Rawlings Molina, CEO, and Chris Burrows, community engagement manager, for GroundGame.Health. During this discussion, we shared more details about our merger with GroundGame.Health and also how we (as a newly combined organization) are helping people overcome health-related social needs. Susan and Chris shared real-world examples about how they are working to close the loop on the last mile in healthcare and significantly impact people’s lives. View the recording.
Abner Mason kicked off the conversation by describing the lack of trust in healthcare due to a challenging regulatory environment, as well as the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to working with members. He described that when a health plan treats everyone the same, it tells the member that who they are doesn’t matter. SameSky Health figured out that if you build a technology that allows you a more personalized, customized, n-of-1 experience, it helps build trust with the member.
SameSky Health also found that what was most often preventing members from engaging in healthcare, improving their well-being, and accessing healthcare, was unmet social needs. Members would have a health plan and benefits, but housing insecurity, financial insecurity, food insecurity, job insecurity, and other unmet social needs were getting in the way. SameSky Health built trust, engaged with people across different cultures, and was able to get members to tell us that their problems were challenges like paying rent, paying electric bills, or getting food on the table for their families. Those became their priorities over tasks such as going in for a wellness visit, which were among the things we were asking people to do. Abner explained that we would be heartbroken at SameSky Health when we heard these stories, but we didn’t have a solution until we met GroundGame.Health. They’ve done the hard work to figure out how to solve people’s social needs at scale across the country, and we’re thrilled that we figured out a way to join forces.
“You can’t address a member’s needs clinically or holistically without addressing what’s happening with them socially…What our GroundGame.Health team members do every day is take that trust that has been built and developed by SameSky Health, grab the person that needs help, and do the work to close the loop and provide the need to get housing, get the meal on the table, and help eliminate those barriers.””
So, why couldn’t something like this have been done before? Susan mentioned that the answer is simply because the technology wasn’t there. What GroundGame.Health has learned and put into practice, is that the only way we can provide an outcome, deliver on a promise to identify the social need and close it, document it, pay for it, and solve the problem is by actually taking the member by the hand. Susan said it takes technology mixed with human-to-human interaction, and that’s where she feels like GroundGame.Health is different. She shared that it’s a scalable solution at the individual level, which is pretty unusual.
Susan went on to say that health plans want to participate and address social needs. They also have new regulatory framework and rules that are coming into place where they need to address social issues and document them. Then there are local community-based organizations (CBOs) across the country, such as Area Agencies on Aging (AAA), that actually specialize in addressing social needs at a community level. What GroundGame.Health has learned is that it takes someone being in the middle to enable the health plans and CBOs — who want to work together — to do so more effectively. With this model, GroundGame.Health brings together these relationships at scale and makes sure the outcomes are measured and documented appropriately for both parties.
Chris Burrows is a licensed social worker in the state of Nevada and is currently set up as a care coordinator. She does in-home visits and telephonic assessments to find out what members need. She goes door-to-door to get assistance and finds local resources for members. During this discussion, Chris shared a touching story of her work as a care coordinator. Chris was able to connect with a member and build trust in order to figure out all of the member’s social needs. She then was able to connect the member with local resources and advocate for her to get in-home assistance, non-emergency medical transportation, financial assistance, and also a wheelchair ramp installed outside of the member’s home. Chris shared that people deal with a constellation of issues like this across the country each day. The technology GroundGame.Health deploys allows them to identify these members and track their needs, manage the workflow, document everything, and also get the necessary information back to the health plan.
GroundGame.Health has already met 182,000 social needs and brought $26 million into communities, and they expect to double those numbers this year with the new combined solution. Susan mentioned that it doesn’t matter what kind of insurance a person has — Medicaid, Medicare, or Commercial — because anyone can have issues with social factors blocking their health and well-being. These are costing unnecessary healthcare dollars when we can intervene instead to reduce those costs. GroundGame.Health can work across all lines of business, and we understand how to do that effectively.
“80% of a person’s health is determined not by what happens when they go visit the doctor or in the clinical setting, but it’s outside and most of that is those social factors, the social determinants of health. We have a much deeper understanding of that now than we have ever had. It’s always been kind of clear, but now we have data that supports it…It doesn’t make sense to be willing to spend an enormous amount of money on the clinical side of things and very little or nothing on the social side when the social factors are really driving up the cost of the clinical.””
Susan and Abner trust that we now have technology that is allowing us to bring our organizations together and make a change within the social determinants of health at scale. They believe GroundGame.Health is the company to meet this moment. The combined solution between SameSky Health and GroundGame.Health is bringing the right group of people with the right partners collaboratively together to meet the moment and take this whole opportunity to the next level. Together we will expand the work in the hopes that the n-of-1 experience will close the loop for millions of people.
Related
