Earlier this month, Managed Health Plans of America (MHPA) hosted a webinar with Socially Determined and Aetna to discuss how Aetna is leveraging Socially Determined’s social risk data, analytics, and solutions to advance health equity for their Medicaid members nationwide.
The speakers, Ashley Perry, Chief Strategy Officer from Socially Determined and Elizabeth Starr, Product Director, SDOH and Community Partnerships from Aetna, discussed how social risk factors such as food insecurity, housing instability, and health literacy challenges directly contribute to suboptimal utilization, avoidable costs, quality measure gaps, and health disparities among vulnerable and historically underserved populations. Assessing and addressing the impact of social risk on Medicaid members is particularly timely given the Medicaid redetermination process that recently resumed. Current projections indicate that up to 40% of Medicaid beneficiaries who lose their coverage as a result of the redetermination process will still qualify for coverage. They will simply be unable to navigate the process successfully due to intervening SDOH barriers and social risk factors.
In order to better address these barriers, Ashley and Elizabeth discussed the growing need for health care organizations to use analytics to identify social risk factors at an individual level in order to develop more equitable strategies to improve outcomes at the market level and more personalized care plans to improve support provided at the member level.
Elizabeth also discussed Aetna's success leveraging data-driven insights for its own population health initiatives. She explained how Aetna is using data-driven, analytics-first tools to gain deeper insights into the SDOH status of its members to support them with better designed and more appropriately tailored programs and services.
Ashley also discussed how Socially Determined’s social risk analytics platform, SocialScapeⓇ, empowers health care organizations to incorporate SDOH and social risk data into their enterprise strategies and data systems efficiently and at scale. She shared best practices for creating an organizational infrastructure that supports a shift towards value-based care, emphasizing the importance of both data-driven decision making as well as strong partnerships between payers, providers, and community-based organizations.
Overall, the webinar provided actionable strategies and valuable insights on how health plans are leveraging SDOH data and analytics to manage risk, improve outcomes, and advance equity at scale across their full market and member populations.
Socially Determined appreciates Elizabeth’s leadership and the entire Aetna Medicaid team’s partnership in this work.