KPMG has worked with Morehouse School of Medicine over the course of several years, bringing them to the KPMG Atlanta Ignition Center to discuss innovation and some of the ongoing work in digital health, telemedicine, data and analytics, and patient access. When COVID-19 hit, there was an opportunity for MSM to pursue a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health. Despite being given less than a week to complete the grant application—and facing stiff competition from across the nation—MSM won the award, with KPMG positioned to lead, building and managing the technology infrastructure to support the work.

The platform, enabled by Salesforce, encompasses a thorough communication strategy developed by leading health disparities researchers and marketing organizations aimed at disproportionally impacted communities across the nation. The data includes attributes from the KPMG Signals Repository, which is an active listening platform that continuously harvests a variety of data from public and private sources. Structured and unstructured data is transformed into complex expressions, creating tens of thousands of signals when used by machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems and is helping the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network (NCRN) significantly improve its accuracy in predictions.

Morehouse School of Medicine is managing the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network to deliver COVID-19-related information to communities hardest hit. They leverage a platform that enables communication and the dissemination of information linking the country’s most vulnerable populations to the right care at the right time, aiming to decrease overall infection and death rates. As one of the key participants in this network, KPMG built and is managing that platform, which will host targeted messaging and support the local COVID-19 response.

Existing KPMG signals and infrastructure enable localized understanding of where people are most likely to be affected by COVID-19—from both health and financial perspectives—and the location of services and assistance potentially available to them; this is used to proactively reach out to members.

Even though the platform is built to address COVID-19, the team believes it is flexible enough to help with any health crisis that a state or nation is facing, including disease surveillance (diabetes, hypertension, etc.), disaster response, academic research, community health management and outreach, and health plan member management.