Guided Access to Expert Care

MSK Direct exists to remove friction at one of the most consequential moments in a person’s life: the onset of a potential cancer diagnosis. Offered through employers, unions, and benefit managers, the program gives members and their families expedited access to Memorial Sloan Kettering expertise—often within days—along with dedicated navigation, expert second opinions, and coordinated care. The value of the program was clear. The challenge was timing. Many members who stood to benefit most from MSK Direct—particularly remote second opinions—did not recognize the relevance until they were already deep into a diagnosis or treatment plan. Engagement was not a matter of awareness. It was a matter of reaching people early enough to meaningfully change the trajectory of care.

Cancer benefits are inherently time-sensitive. The window in which guidance can influence decisions is often narrow, and once it closes, access alone is no longer enough. The surface issue looked like underutilization. The deeper issue was latency. MSK Direct relied on members self-identifying a need or encountering employer communications at precisely the right moment—an unrealistic expectation during a period of stress and uncertainty. By the time many members engaged, opportunities for early intervention or second opinions had already diminished. The challenge wasn’t whether the benefit worked. It was whether the program could act before certainty existed.

MSK Direct operates at a high-trust intersection: employer-sponsored benefits, cancer care, and clinical authority. Moving too cautiously meant missing critical moments where early guidance could improve outcomes. Moving too aggressively risked alarming members or undermining trust before a diagnosis was confirmed. The goal wasn’t engagement for its own sake. It was proactive relevance, delivered with clinical credibility and restraint.

The first decision was to prioritize speed to market without compromising trust. Rather than building an entirely new digital experience from scratch, MSK Direct partnered with Jasper Health as a delivery accelerator. Jasper provided a mature technical foundation that allowed the program to move quickly—compressing time to market while avoiding a prolonged build phase. At the same time, the experience was implemented as a fully MSK-branded, white-labeled interface. In a benefits context where institutional trust and clinical authority are paramount, it was essential that members engaged directly with MSK Direct. This preserved ownership of the experience, the member relationship, and the standard of care—while allowing execution to move at pace. The second—and more consequential—decision was to lean into proactive outreach. A homegrown machine-learning model was developed using aggregated member claims data, securely governed and hosted in collaboration with Abett. The model was designed to predict the likelihood of a cancer diagnosis—often before confirmation—and to proactively surface MSK Direct’s remote second-opinion benefit to eligible members. This was not a passive relevance engine. It was an early-signal system. The model directly informed outreach, intentionally ahead of certainty, with careful attention to tone, timing, and eligibility boundaries. Predictions guided when to engage, not what decisions members should make. Clinical judgment and choice remained firmly human-owned. This required close alignment across clinical leadership, compliance, digital partners, and benefits stakeholders—anchored by a shared principle: acting early is only valuable if trust is preserved.

The approach materially changed how and when members engaged with MSK Direct. Remote second opinions and navigation services were surfaced earlier in the care journey—sometimes before a confirmed diagnosis—giving members the opportunity to act with more information and less urgency-driven pressure. Engagement increased not because communication was louder, but because it arrived when it was most relevant. Employers and union partners saw clearer realization of benefit value. MSK Direct retained ownership of the member relationship, reinforced confidence in the program, and established a scalable model for proactive, data-informed engagement that did not depend on members self-identifying at exactly the right moment. Equally important, the work demonstrated that predictive outreach—when designed with restraint and accountability—can expand access without eroding trust.

In high-stakes healthcare benefits, waiting for certainty is often the wrong default. The real work is knowing how to act before it arrives—without overstepping trust.