The Meaning Behind Our Mission: Making an Impact in Medicaid

For over 20 years, Sellers Dorsey has made improving the healthcare system our number one priority. We do this because we believe that access to quality healthcare is fundamental to helping people live their fullest, healthiest lives. Together with our clients, we work from coast to coast delivering impactful results, expanding the reach of Medicaid, and improving its ability to provide care to those in need.

Partnering with our clients, our mission is to deliver innovative solutions that improve healthcare quality, equity, and access in the Medicaid program. This mission has guided the Firm’s growth since our founding and continues to guide our direction toward the future. The impact that we make on the lives of Medicaid beneficiaries and underserved populations is an indicator of our success and motivates us to continue the work we do each day.

Q: Where did our mission come from?

Charity: The Firm’s cofounder, Martin (Marty) Sellers, has several decades of experience in both the public and private healthcare sectors. Before co-founding the Firm in 2000, he helped create one of the nation’s largest state-based healthcare government relations firms, facilitating relationships between providers, state agencies, and the federal government.

Combining his perspective on healthcare innovation and policy with political expertise, Marty fueled the firm’s initial momentum alongside co-founder, Brian Dorsey, who before founding the Firm, served as a communications leader for two statewide healthcare organizations and as a public relations and executive leadership consultant. Brian now serves as the Firm’s Chief Culture Officer, ensuring the culture at Sellers Dorsey remains rooted in the Firm’s core values – accountability, growth, openness, respect, and well-being. Through their collective career experiences, Marty and Brian saw a need across the healthcare landscape, specifically within Medicaid. Partnering with states, providers, health plans, and other stakeholders, the Firm’s initial efforts to strengthen the critical safety net system and improve healthcare for vulnerable communities have grown tremendously.

Q: How has our mission evolved?

Charity: Medicaid is in a constant state of change and our mission has grown and evolved alongside it. Throughout the years, Sellers Dorsey has become a catalyst for healthcare transformation, working alongside our clients and partners in nearly every state to strengthen the Medicaid program. Our mission today focuses on impact, which is important from several perspectives.

The first is from the perspective of Sellers Dorsey. It’s our mission to improve equity, quality, and access to care for Medicaid beneficiaries. We truly want to improve the lives of people on Medicaid and to accomplish this there needs to be a dedicated focus on impact. While our mission has always revolved around creating healthier lives for underserved populations, the way we’ve demonstrated it has grown. There has been a shift in not just demonstrating the dollars we’ve generated for the Medicaid program, but more importantly, demonstrating how those dollars end up improving the lives of those who are on the program.

Q: What does our mission mean to our clients?

Charity: From our client’s perspective, our mission is a collective call to action. Sellers Dorsey, together with our clients,  wants to enhance equity, quality, and access within the Medicaid program to benefit Medicaid beneficiaries. With Medicaid financing, many of our initiatives include increasing overall reimbursement for providers struggling to offer access to quality healthcare services due to low reimbursement rates.  We design programs to secure critical funding for safety net providers which, in turn, enables them to improve access to quality care and the latest treatments for their Medicaid populations. This can be seen in our work with GA-STRONG as well as our work in Kentucky where we’ve helped expand access and improve patient outcomes for some of the largest health systems in those states.

We also have initiatives with solution partners, like Pyx Health, where we worked together to increase awareness of the loneliness epidemic that’s affecting people across the country. Through our collaboration, we were able to form strategic partnerships between Pyx Health and various health plans, helping improve loneliness and depression scores among members, reduce emergency department visits, and cover more than 6 million people in over 70 markets across nearly 30 states.

These kinds of projects propel the improvement of healthcare quality, equity and access for low-income and marginalized populations, and they are what our mission is built upon and what continues to move it forward.

Q: What does our mission mean to our team?

Charity: From the countless communities we serve to our own families, we’ve seen firsthand the lifeline that Medicaid provides. Many of our team members have been personally impacted by the Medicaid program, whether it has helped their children, extended family, or friends.

When my mother suffered a massive stroke, it was the support and services she received through Medicaid and Medicare that helped us ensure that she had the treatment, the equipment, and the resources she needed to recover and regain her independence.

Q: What’s next? How will Sellers Dorsey continue to pursue its mission?

Charity: To understand the Firm’s impact, we must measure it. Whether we’re redesigning Medicaid managed care programs to improve patient outcomes like we did in Kentucky, or addressing the healthcare workforce crisis like we did in Georgia, the programs that Sellers Dorsey create have specific goals and objectives that all revolve around our mission. As we continue to drive transformational change in healthcare for underserved populations, we understand the importance of conveying our impact, not just for growth, but to serve as a model for states across the country looking to make similar transformations within their healthcare systems.

Alongside our clients, we will continue to create innovative solutions to complex challenges, and we will continue to help them record the necessary data to meet specific measurements that demonstrate a significant impact on the communities they serve.

Want to learn more about our team? Click here to explore culture at Sellers Dorsey!