Abner Mason (he/him) is the founder and CEO of SameSky Health, a cultural experience company, that uses technology and a human touch to help health plans connect with their members and advance their health equity initiatives.

With an extensive professional history focused on health equity, Abner brings knowledge from multiple sectors into his work with Medicare and Medicaid members. His 14 years of experience as a Chief Policy Advisor in the state of Massachusetts allow him to see the intersection between technology, policy, and health equity.

Here, he shares his insights on working with this particularly vulnerable and underserved population — and what health solution innovators should keep in mind.

In Full Health (IFH): What health equity issues motivated you to start SameSky Health?

Abner Mason: One of the key challenges we’re addressing at SameSky Health is building trust. We have a trust problem in our health care system. And what we’re trying to do at SameSky Health is to build trust — particularly amongst people and communities who, frankly, have not been treated well by the health care system.

In America, we have a trust issue, and that trust issue is real. We should not be mad at people who don’t trust the health care system, because they often have good reasons to have their doubts.

Instead of being mad at them, blaming them, or pointing a finger at them, we should be asking the question, “How do we bridge this gap between people who don’t fully trust and who don’t fully engage?” We’ve positioned SameSky Health to be the partner for health plans and other stakeholders as they begin and advance their health equity journeys.

IFH: How does SameSky Health address these obstacles and challenges?

Abner Mason: In short, at SameSky Health we’re trying to bridge the gap that leads to mistrust in the health care system. What we have realized is that if you get to the heart of what is missing — it’s engaging people in a way that builds trust by treating people like who they are as individuals, matters.

The way the health care system works most often is through a one-size-fits-all approach. There is usually one approach to developing health care-related content. Typically, a message is written by English speakers, for English speakers. The message might be translated because either it’s a requirement, or because it’s the right thing to do — but either way, it’s still one message that doesn’t take social and cultural factors into consideration for the audience receiving the message.

IFH: To intentionally engage with people, SameSky Health has created “CultureGuide” — how does this strong foundation of knowledge work to decrease health disparities?

Abner Mason: One of the key challenges we’ve got to address is how to understand who people are at a deeper level, at a cultural level. It’s not just about the color of a person’s skin or the language they speak, although these are important factors. It’s about culture.

We have the tools today to understand who people are through a cultural lens. With CultureGuide, we have built a technology platform that allows us to ingest large amounts of data — public data, private data, and claims data. We are then able to share that knowledge with our Community Health Guides, a team of people who look like and come from the same cultural backgrounds as the people we’re engaging.

We bring together the people, experiences, technology, and data — allowing us to create engaging content that is more personalized, customized, and that connects with people in a way that they feel like we have taken the time to try to figure out who they are. That’s what CultureGuide is.

Lee Shapiro

Expressing Gratitude

When I was looking for funding, I got all “nos” until I found 7wireVentures and met Managing Partner Lee Shapiro. He heard my story and I got to know him. And for the first time I was like, here is someone who gets it and who is not just willing, but eager to look outside of his own personal experience and his bubble of people that he knows. I just want to give a lot of credit, and thanks to 7wireVentures and the whole team, but also Lee Shapiro who really led that effort. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here where I am now.

Abner Mason
Founder and CEO, Samesky Health

IFH: The foundation of your work is creating content that is personalized to the individual, and a key example of this is in your efforts to expand text messaging as a way for health plans to interact with their members. How did this work come about — and why is it so essential?

Abner Mason: If you ask people in America today, “How do they communicate with their family and friends?” the answers should be driving how we communicate with them in health care. US mail? Maybe one person will raise their hand. Email? A few people will raise their hand, but not many. But if you ask, “Do you communicate by text message?” Every hand in the room will go up.

This is the way America communicates in 2022. And it’s definitely the way low-income Medicaid members communicate. Texting is asynchronous, meaning that they don’t have to answer right then. So, if you want to talk to a mom about arranging a wellness visit for her child, she may be working and can’t answer the phone. But if you send her a text message, she can read it on her break, or she can wait until that evening to get home and respond. That’s the power of text messaging — particularly two-way text messaging.

In this way, texting becomes a health equity issue. If we say we want to meet people where they are and actually build trusted relationships with them — but we’re unwilling to communicate in the only way that they’re comfortable — then we ought to stop saying that we care about health equity. We should not ask people to start reading mail to communicate with us. We should not ask them to simply change who they are and how they live. We must change how we do things and change the policies needed to support it.

IFH: Based on your work and experiences, what would you want people in the health innovation pipeline to know about the intersection of health solutions, equity, and Medicaid/Medicare members?

Abner Mason: I think the key takeaway is that we need to view new innovations, new approaches in health care, and new policies through what I refer to as a health equity lens. We haven’t done that in the past. We’ve done things without regard to their impact on health equity and on how it’s going to affect low-income, hard-to-reach, and low health literacy populations that have historically not been well served by the health care system — like Medicare and Medicaid members.

We need to view all health innovations through an interconnected health equity lens. Medicaid is the largest health program in the US. There are 88 million Americans who get their health care through the Medicaid program. More than 40% of the babies born in this country are deliveries covered by the Medicaid benefit. If you can figure out how to innovate in Medicaid and build solutions that work better, you can have a profoundly positive impact on health care in the US simply because the program is so big. Medicaid — and health solutions that make it a priority — are essential to our country’s future.