If we want people to experience whole person health – states will have to do a lot of silo-busting to integrate, streamline and coordinate disparate medical, social and economic programs. Data will be the axis of the strategy, but who owns that data and what guardrails are needed? How do we encourage not just data but also technology sharing across state programs?

Jess Kahn joins me to discuss state efforts to integrate programs, technology and data to support whole person health. She’s a partner at McKinsey specializing in state Medicaid and social service programs, public-sector data and technology. Before joining McKinsey she led Medicaid data and systems at CMS. 

We discuss:   

• Dual lessons from COVID: the danger of public health data silos and the possibility of rapid innovation

• The technology and data infrastructure states are building for whole person health

• How states are partnering with nonprofit health data utilities 

• The big miss from the national EHR rollout: user-centered design 

Jess highlights the dangerous gap in federal authority and accountability around the sensitive social data:

"So the risks are really clear… this is data that tells you a lot more about the vulnerabilities people have … There isn't a federal agency that asserts that they have some kind of legal authority to set boundaries … Who's going to write that regulation? Who's going to tell state Medicaid agencies – or any entity for that matter – what the guardrails are around collection, around sharing, around ownership?”