Connected Health: From Niche to Necessity

We live in a time where the world is growing more connected every day through mobile technology, the sharing economy, and social media, and healthcare is changing at an equally rapid rate. It’s now the norm for individuals to use technology to interact with their healthcare providers, view their personal health information, and track their health and wellness. HealthIT.gov reports that nearly half of all Americans are using some online system to manage.

As this number continues to grow, the healthcare industry is poised to realize its full potential as a connected health ecosystem. The biggest challenge to the industry at the moment is to solve the pain points in the process by providing easier access to data and integrating disconnected systems for both large and small businesses.

By now everyone knows the story: healthcare is fraught with complications, with different systems, massive paperwork redundancies and mistakes at every level of transaction that takes place. Every employer has their own way of managing their workforce. Every health insurance carrier has their own method of enrollment and managing sensitive information coming in from employers and individuals. Then there is the broker, who has inherited the unique role of being in the middle often helping things to run smoothly.

Technology will not replace the expertise that a broker or health insurance professional can bring to the table. However, the right tools can be a powerful partner and aid in transforming the carrier/client relationship and the product distribution across channels. There is still much work to be done to connect data, integrate systems, and increase access to rate, benefit, underwriting and other decision support information.

We’ve seen other industries such as travel and banking become agile and mobile, with companies able to innovate and provide customers with a better experience by empowering them with access to data. However, in health insurance and employee benefits, we need greater synergy between startups, carriers and integrators willing to pull together rate, benefit and industry data and logic, to enable similar innovation.

At Limelight Health, we continue on our quest to simplify the complex and confusing employee benefits process by connecting systems and bringing data driven decision support. We believe that this process can become an enjoyable experience.  As we continue to develop and improve upon our technology, our focus is to integrate with as many industry systems as possible.

Our current product, QuotePad, connects with a number of the most popular B2B applications and those connections are growing. When we design new features for our systems, we are looking to build solutions for all users in the employee benefits ecosystem.

As we help transform insurance technology, it’s not just about creating a quoting platform. It’s about becoming a hub that connects all the players-- -health insurance carrier with broker, broker with employer, employer and individual with enrollment system. Our aim is to reduce complexity by connecting processes to one another to create the most seamless “quote to enroll” experience using any existing system. We hope you’ll join us.