This post was originally ghost-written for Maxwell Health CEO and Co-Founder Veer Gidwaney and published under his name in BenefitsPro and on the Maxwell Health Blog.
Netflix, the fastest-growing entertainment company in America, owns no movies. Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no cars. AirBnb, the world’s largest accommodations provider, owns no homes or hotels. But they are the most innovative and disruptive companies in their industries because they own their marketplaces, they own the interface, and they’ve made payment seamless. It’s time for such innovation in the employee benefits industry.
The State of Play Today
The experience of buying benefits is the equivalent in entertainment of paying individual actors, directors, producers, and editors in order to watch a movie. Health insurance might be from one carrier, life and dental insurance from another. HSAs are a critical component to a high-deductible plan, yet they’re accessed separately. The benefits buying process is complex, tedious and confusing, but it’s an order of magnitude harder to use your benefits throughout the year.
We should be able to enroll and access all our benefits through one interface and pay for everything through one monthly subscription in the same way we outsource our entertainment to Netflix. By many predictions, that disruption will not come from within the industry. Insurance companies today have some of the lowest net promoter scores of any industry, and strategic partnerships with trustworthy, consumer-centric brands may prove not only a powerful distribution channel, but a sticky solution to attract and retain customers for life.
What the Future Looks Like
There does not exist a company in insurance or employee benefits that can do what Netflix has done for entertainment, but modern benefits platforms have huge potential, and exchanges are a piece of that puzzle. Like Netflix, exchanges are essentially online marketplaces, within benefits platforms for HR teams and their employees, providing tools and resources to empower individuals and families to make the right decisions and actively engage in their health, wealth and wellness. As of yet, exchange adoption rates have not lived up to the industry expectations. Here’s what the technology solutionsneed to learn from disruptors in other industries to bridge the gap.
- Drive Relevance: Most people spend more time shopping for a TV than for benefits, so our biggest hurdle is to make complicated products relevant. People don’t want to engage with this industry, they won’t watch that educational video. We need to focus on changing the language we use to talk about benefits, and provide context to make them relevant and engaging.
- Packaging for Impact: Netflix offers more choices without overwhelming users because of how they curate content, recommending shows and movies based on individual preferences. People want to make their own benefits decisions, but the process is complicated and confusing. As an industry, we need to streamline and simplify the user experiences we create. Leveraging intuitive technology to curate holistic benefits packages is a critical first step.
- Intuitive Interfaces: Apple sets the standard in design and user experiences today. We expect real-time feedback, iterative updates, and responsive mobile experiences so that we can access what we need wherever and whenever. Paper-based, fax machine-powered transactions are the status quo in insurance, and that’s unacceptable.
- Seamless payment: Part of the appeal of Uber and Netflix is not having to use a credit card at every interaction. It is the ultimate in simplicity, and makes it that much easier for me to use their service. Paying for benefits is another story entirely. Payroll deductions, copays, deductibles, co-insurance...we need simple products within one interface, handled in one payment
- Leverage Data to Drive Behavior Change: To “move the needle” in healthcare spending, the end users we serve — actual American families — need to change their behaviors to not only become more educated healthcare consumers, but to live healthier lives. The data exists today to make that happen, but that data is siloed. Exchanges can incorporate products that address the multiple facets of health and wellness and therefore have an immense opportunity to streamline that data and leverage it to create not only savvier health care consumers, but healthier, wealthier American families.