Though the healthcare sector has been advancing rapidly, when comparing the data for these populations against national data sets, it is analyzed that the numbers are worse for individuals receiving long-term services and supports than they are for the average American. These disparities around health equity and access are real and must be addressed. This is where MediSked—a company dedicated to delivering person-centered software solutions—is creating a difference. “Our technology enables clients to address these challenges by providing the tools to care managers and staff to be able to identify gaps in care, to view dashboards and tasks, to remind the staff of what’s necessary when it comes to preventive care, treatment, annual physicals, immunizations, and screenings. The first step is to provide awareness of those basic needs for everyone supported. The second step is to act, collaborate, and hold organizations accountable to providing person-centered, whole-person health services,” explains Doug Golub, President, MediSked.

MediSked provides software solutions for care coordination entities, insurance payers, government, and providers. For each of these different groups, they get a chance to see things at a population level through different lenses. The MediSked technology supports populations in the long-term services and supports (LTSS) realm that are typically high acuity with a high level of needs including older adults, people with physical disabilities, HIV aids, intellectual and developmental disabilities, behavioral, mental health, traumatic brain injury, and spinal cord injury. For years, MediSked has been identifying trends across different cohorts including age, geography, race, and other intersectionalities. When the team examines the data, they find fascinating trends in preventative care and treatment, smoking, underlying conditions, diabetes, and heart disease.

Improving Lives with Innovation
At MediSked, the team’s sole mission as the leading brand in holistic solutions is to improve lives, drive efficiencies, and generate innovations for health and human service organizations thatsupport our community. The MediSked solution suite includes several powerful tools that allow clients to harness the power of data to enhance care efficiency and increase cost savings. MediSked Coordinate allows clients to centralize complex care management processes from the assessment through planning, service authorization, record management, and documentation. Whereas, the company’s business intelligence platform, MediSked Connect Exchange, is used for reporting & analytics, population health tracking, waiver & waitlist management, record management, and quality measures all in a central location that provides integrations and data warehouse capabilities. MediSked Portal is a person-centered platform for individuals and their circles of support to collaborate and communicate, delivering critical information across teams. Finally, MediSked Connect is an agency management tool which centralizes and manages information in order to transform service delivery across provider agencies with simple modules for scheduling, billing, individual plans and outcomes, reporting, and documentation.

MediSked was created 20 years ago when the internet was not highly available, and data was siloed. The team realized that the future required integration and the ability to connect different data sources and systems together. As Golub explains, “When we launched Connect Exchange in 2013, the key was for it to be a multi-agency business intelligence platform, which required interfaces at the core of the platform. We designed many functions around creating interfaces that provide reliable, accurate, relevant, timely, and quality data with feeds that are constantly monitored with room for human intervention. This is quite different than your typical create, read, update, and delete model within a database or within an electronic health record.” This has enabled the company to pull together different data sources to have claims data and EHR data in one place, allowing staff to identify gaps in care as well as needs across the populations. It’s provided businesses with the tools necessary to take MediSked to the next level through interfacing and integrations and sharing data in an appropriate way. “That’s how we’ve been able to provide the best of what’s available to our clients today,” extols Golub.

Creating Specialized Care
Since its inception, MediSked has focused on long term services and supports in home and community-based services. There are about 2 million Americans on Medicaid waivers, which are programs that states can use to offer specialized benefits to a subset of Medicaid beneficiaries. Medicaid waiver populations often have high costs for services and health care. These are individuals with needs that are often overlooked by the general population, and MediSked’s clients work diligently to ensure these individuals have the supports needed to thrive. This is a significant amount of the work that MediSked does for general population health management. “Our clients can harness the power of our technology and the population health data they collect to find creative supports that allow individuals to thrive in a world that wasn’t necessarily built for them, to make it a world in which everyone belongs. For example, women diagnosed with breast cancer who had regular mammograms have a 60% lower risk of dying from the disease in the 10 years after diagnosis compared to women who do not have regular screening. MediSked has a discipline dedicated to data analytics and research which allows the opportunity to examine rich data sets and share insights that can inform the industry and advance advocacy efforts. We looked at a sample of our client health care plans and found that individuals in Managed Care had better preventive screening rates than the national average while fee-for-service is far below the national average. Mammograms can be traumatic and inaccessible for people with disabilities, which results in people forgoing them. One of our managed care clients began offering alternative screening options including breast ultrasound to increase screening compliance. Their breast cancer screening rate is now 5% higher than the national average,” explains Golub.

The complex populations that MediSked focuses on provide opportunities for population health that the general population doesn’t provide. For example, these are populations that are highly assessed multiple times each year as there are strict eligibility criteria for them to qualify for services and supports. MediSked solutions provide the data behind these assessments and allows the agency to identify other trends, such as why people weren’t getting vaccinated when vaccines were readily available during COVID 19; correlations between depression and anxiety and different prescribed medications; and what criteria might make someone a good candidate for moving to a more integrated setting in the community and the incredible quality of life improvements and cost savings that come as a result. This means that organizations understand people’s health outcomes and whether individuals are getting treatment for diabetes, or screenings for cancers which could have a major impact on their quality of life, especially if caught too late. By identifying people who were interested in finding employment, organizations can connect them to services and supports with tools to illuminate who these people are and what needs weren’t being fulfilled so that clients can be the most effective in their roles of supporting better lives for all.

Holistic Healthcare Solutions
Emerging from the public health emergency truly changed things for MediSked as a company. It created a chance to retreat and regroup and helped to realize that going forward, MediSked could operate differently as a company by highlighting all the possibilities and synergies that are out there. “As we move into the future, we are more eager than ever to enhance our products to embrace the mission of being the leading brand and holistic solutions that improve lives, drive efficiencies, and generate innovations for health and human service organizations that support our community. We have innovative projects coming up around how we’re using natural language processing and sentiment analysis to identify trends from the data that we have. We are conducting a study of people with epilepsy and depression and drawing some correlations between the medications that they’re on and using sentiment analysis within these individual’s service notes. We’re getting more and more comfortable with looking at our data differently than the simple rows and columns that it’s always existed in. These new trends will help our clients to better organize data so that we can get to a point where someone can essentially ask a question and get an answer,” concludes Golub.