Perspectives

Susan Rawlings Molina is the Co-Founder and CEO of GroundGame.Health, a digital healthcare platform that connects Community Based Organizations (CBOs) with health plans to meet Social Determinant of Health (SDoH) needs of the most difficult to engage healthcare populations.

Before leading GroundGame.Health, Susan was the President and CEO of HealthPlan Services, a subsidiary of Wipro. Prior to that, she was President and CEO of TMG Health Inc, a Medicare and Medicaid-focused outsourcer of business processes. She prepared the company for its acquisition by Cognizant in 2017. Earlier in her career, she held CEO, board and other leadership roles at various public and private health plans.

We connected with Susan to learn more about her childhood aspirations, the company’s exciting combination with SameSky Health, how the business is working to close care gaps for the most vulnerable members in our society, and much more in our latest Top of the Ladder feature.

Could you share a little about your childhood background?

I was born and raised in Indiana. Most of my growing up years were in Muncie, a very “normal” Midwestern city. It’s the home of Ball State University and the subject of various sociological studies, including the “Middletown” series published in the 1930’s. Muncie is often described as a typical small-American community, and my experience growing up was very traditional. We grew up roaming the neighborhoods on our bikes, playing dodgeball in the streets and, of course, drinking water from a garden hose. I was active in sports and was a drummer in the band through college.

My family came from humble farming, teaching, and blue-collar beginnings, and my parents were educated and had professional jobs. My father was the Dean of Continuing Education at Ball State and was an early pioneer in creating off-campus education; my mother was a teacher and taught remedial reading at the middle school level.

My mother became ill when I was around 9 years old and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. This deeply affected my life. She was unable to support me in the ways she had previously before she became ill. This experience and the challenges my mother and my entire family faced deeply influenced the person I became.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a doctor from my earliest memories. I was naturally inclined to help people – and sort of had a knack for it – and naturally came upon opportunities and situations to help lift people up around me.

I went to the University of Arizona to pursue premed. Once I got there and experienced freedom for the first time, premed went to the background.  I ended up pursuing a BSBA degree in accounting, and I became a CPA. Through that experience, I learned that I was good at conceptualizing issues and problems and then creating and executing solutions to address them.

How did you find yourself in healthcare?

I was working as an analyst at a savings & loan company in Los Angeles, and I randomly interviewed and then accepted a job with a company called Maxicare. I had no idea what an HMO was. Maxicare at the time was the largest publicly traded HMO in the U.S. My first week on the job was memorable as I was quickly learning how business and medicine came together to help people. It really inspired me, and I immediately realized I had found my path. That was July 1987, and I have been in and around healthcare ever since.

You have a deep history serving as CEO of multiple healthcare companies over the years. How has the industry changed and has there been anything that’s stayed consistent?

My first response is not much has changed… the adage that “the more things change the more they stay the same” holds true here. Throughout my CEO career, I’ve attended meetings that were literally a replay of meetings held in the late 80s, 90s, and 2000’s, especially as new folks came into leadership roles and faced similar problems. While there has been, for sure, better technology and many industry learnings, regulations that were set up to balance the industry have also restrained innovation. We are still navigating very similar problems over the years, and of course, health remains a human condition. Ultimately, we still need to address health issues on an individualized basis.

Sticky, truly transformational changes take time. I think about the flywheel effect and how real change is created, accepted, and maintained to move the industry forward. An example of a transformational change is related to how state and federal regulatory structures influence how we at GroundGame.Health (GGH) can handle social issues. Remember, social barriers to well-being are not a new problem. Recently, though, regulators have codified transformational elements. For example, in 2021, CMS issued a new roadmap for states to address social determinants of health (SDoH) and enables CMS to pay for standardized SDoH risk assessments and facilitates access to community-based organizations and resources. This regulatory framework is now part of the flywheel. This is hard work, and it takes investments to innovate, regulatory frameworks to incentivize change, and companies to breakthrough and drive meaningful and sustainable change. Solving social needs resides at a human level, and you must know what problem you’re solving and how to solve it, one person at a time.

How did you decide to start GroundGame.Health with your co-founder Sri Akula? What drove you to the mission of closing social gaps for the most challenging-to-reach members?

When Sri and I were looking to start a company in 2020, we knew we wanted to combine my healthcare and Sri’s product and technology backgrounds. We found the perfect combination in two small, interrelated existing startups that we combined in 2022 to form GGH.  They had created an innovative model for addressing social issues in partnership with community-based organizations. We joined in late 2020 and helped frame the foundation for raising capital and successfully grow the business. We purchased the two small companies with seed capital in 2022 and formed what is now GroundGame Health.

In the early days, the company’s technology and services solution helped reduce readmissions and emergency room visits by identifying and solving health plan members’ social needs locally. This opportunity also aligned well with our passion. Sri and I saw a larger opportunity to close care gaps around unmet social needs more broadly for high-acuity, high-risk members. The members we serve are generally very hard-to-reach and difficult to consistently engage in healthcare (for example, high-risk pregnant women).

In 2020, our first year of joining the company, we helped bring in $1.5 million in revenue. In 2023, we closed the year with over $20 million of revenue. GroundGame.Health is now in 50 states, scaling one person at a time.

We are so thrilled about our investment in GroundGame.Health and the combination with SameSky Health. As you think about the combined business moving forward, what are you most excited about?

I’m excited about the combination as well. Through the merger, we expanded our products, staff and customers.

One example of how we have expanded our existing capabilities is the personalized, n of 1 approach we are taking to build trust and engage members based on what we learn about them. This includes elements such as their preferred language, their cultural background, and their communications preferences. Through our personalized approach and human-to-human connections at the local level, we are very effective at reaching and engaging hard-to-reach members who often have the greatest health needs and do not seek help on their own.

We need more investors like 7wire to drive real impact and change in the healthcare industry. Investors like 7wire are looking for solutions like ours to pull holistic solutions together that can demonstrate and document real results – people helped, dollars saved, and communities supported.

What is your superpower?

My superpower is empathetic simplicity, with a touch of fearless grit. I do my best to truly listen, synthesize the information, then simplify the issues at hand, whether they be problems to solve or products to sell. I have found that if I can simplify the “problem,” I can explain the challenge simply. Leading and executing become easier and more effective. “What problem are we trying to solve” – my favorite question!

What is one piece of advice you would love to give to your younger self?

I would say “trust yourself” and listen to that inner voice. I used to think that someone else in the room was always smarter than I was and would hold back. I have learned that we all have a perspective worth hearing and debating.

At one point earlier in my career, I was being mentored by a CEO who asked me a challenging question.  I responded with a rational answer rather than what my true perspective was. He wisely called me out on it, and that was when I realized that I needed to trust my voice and expertise. That was 20+ years ago and I remember it verbatim.

What is one book that you would recommend?

One book I highly recommend is “Autobiography of a Yogi” written by Paramahansa Yogananda. It’s an engaging story from an amazing man, whether one subscribes to eastern wisdom or not. This book encapsulates life lessons learned and offers a great perspective around self-realization.