How technology can make your health plans effective

Despite how much technology has transformed healthcare, health plans can still be frustratingly difficult to use. From finding a provider to figuring out your copay, seeking affordable care can seem like a murky process at best — and it's causing Americans to avoid care altogether.

According to the KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), one in four adults say they have skipped or postponed medical care because of costs. Given that Americans collectively owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, those fears aren't necessarily unwarranted. However, a good health plan should encourage members to use it when they need it. And for health insurance company Centivo, easy access to a primary care provider, or PCP, is key to user-friendly, affordable health plan design.?

"We're not going to reinvent the wheel when it comes to something like adjudicating claims, but when it comes to the member experience, that's what we're trying to build up," says Boris Khomut, senior vice president of digital product at Centivo. "We created [a search] engine that can recommend a primary care provider based on members' preferences. With one click, they can schedule an appointment with that [provider] and access referrals from the provider. Those are the kinds of things that we've done to leverage technology to reduce friction that exists in the healthcare system. "

Read more: Can tech give health plans a much-needed upgrade?

Join us at Employee Benefit News’ BENEFITS AT WORK on September 17-18 in San Diego to explore mental health, building the modern family, and employee retention and workplace culture.

COMPASSION DURING A DIFFICULT TIME: Between three-day bereavement leave policies and 12 weeks of unpaid leave covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act, U.S. employees often find themselves working through an illness, a loved one's death or a personal emergency.?

Leave management software company Cocoon wants to change that. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Cocoon implemented a first-of-its-kind compassionate leave policy, offering four weeks of paid leave for circumstances not covered by existing company leave policies. This could include undergoing an abortion, suffering a miscarriage and the death of someone who is not immediate family.

"Leave laws are patchwork in the United States: Some states say you can only go on bereavement for immediate family or partners, other states have broader laws and some states don't have any laws," says Amber Zeise, director of people at Cocoon. "The goal of compassionate leave is to fill the gaps, encompassing all the reasons folks could need time away from work."

Read more: Is compassionate leave the next table-stakes benefit?

EXPANDING YOUR FAMILY: A comprehensive fertility platform goes beyond helping people have a baby. At accounting software company Xero, a partnership with Carrot Fertility offers employees support at multiple life stages.?

Two Xero employees, Martha Coraggio, a senior account manager based in Texas, and Deana Sdao, head of social media for the Americas, U.K. and EMEA and based in Toronto, utilized the Carrot benefit at very different phases in their family-building journeys — one already a mother, the other making sure she had the option to become one when the time is right.?

Sdao, who is in her mid-30s, had looked into freezing her eggs while in her 20s, but the high cost made it prohibitive. A combination of career plans and discovering her egg count was low led her to consider it again more recently. When Xero announced its partnership with Carrot in January 2022, she immediately looked into it. After connecting with specialists at Carrot and working with her private practitioner to make sure she was completely prepared for the procedure, Sdao had 15 of her eggs retrieved and frozen in 2023, 12 of which ended up being viable.???????

"It's been such a weight lifted off my shoulders," she says. "I know my career ambitions. I don't anticipate I'll have kids until my mid- to late 30s, so I was just trying to set myself up for that. My manager was very flexible with me, I didn't have any stress and the support from work gave me the comfort [level] to share my journey, which I don't know that I would have felt okay doing otherwise."

Read more: Xero's family-building benefits go beyond fertility support