Employers are in pain

Duncan Sibson, Krish Maypole

Over the last several years, healthcare companies have embraced selling insurance benefits to self-funded employers. As employers continue prioritizing the wellbeing of their employees, many companies in this space have found strong product-market fit.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened collective focus on healthcare, funding for digital health and healthcare companies continues to skyrocket. And employers are spending more on healthcare than ever before.

Lots of companies have popped up in response to the demand for employer-focused healthcare solutions. As employers look to design effective, complete health benefits for their employees, they might be left sifting through thousands of options—for a single condition or body part. Expanding this process to create a complete set of benefits can be overwhelming.

“During my twenty years building out health benefits for tens of thousands of people, it’s never been easy,” said Craig Sidell, an advisor to Icon Health and former head of benefits at the New York Times. “In more recent years, it’s gotten even harder, especially within the musculoskeletal space. There are too many narrow point solutions, and piling so many options on top of each other to try and offer something complete is inefficient, unsustainable, and complex.”

The conglomeration of many distinct solutions is called the benefits ecosystem. The current array of options poses a daunting set of challenges for both employers and their members. Employer-related healthcare spend is projected to increase in 2022, and spend on MSK care is an area of particularly high growth. Throwing more money at the problem is unlikely to fix it. 

For employers, challenges stretch across ecosystem design, solution implementation, and interoperability. To create effective health benefits, an employer might need to implement ten specialized point solutions, each presenting its own implementation timeline and associated set of headaches, including money, time, vendor management, and complex software tools.

Even once point solutions are implemented, they frequently don’t integrate with each other, which creates more headaches and further perpetuates the age-old silo problem in healthcare.

Despite employer efforts to innovate, similar problems still plague the care that members receive. Healthcare costs are astronomically high, while the quality of care remains low. Overutilization, inconsistent outcomes, and confusing healthcare experiences persist.

With inaccessible patient data and lagging implementation times, members also often face failed transitions when moving from one solution to another within the benefits ecosystem. These failed transitions can be harmful, especially for people with more complex conditions.

Icon Health supports pain points for employers and members alike. Our end-to-end care management and navigation solution improves the modern benefits ecosystem for musculoskeletal (MSK) care. 

Most MSK solutions address only a small percentage of members, at times using stringent exclusion criteria to cherry pick their member populations. These solutions aren’t sufficient.

We need accessible and affordable care that fixes pain and provides support to people when and where they need it. Icon Health brings together elements of virtual and in-person care to support every member’s condition, helping ease pressures on a strained healthcare system.

At Icon, we’re improving how the modern benefits ecosystem is constructed. We’re changing healthcare for the better on a large scale, and our solution is fully integrated. Our solution can fit seamlessly within any employer's current benefit ecosystem. Above all, we aim to fill gaps in patient care and ensure that members are fully supported throughout their MSK pathway. 

We support our members end-to-end as they move through the healthcare system, from primary care provider visit to specialist referral and physical therapy. In the process, we make sure that data is available, providers are high-quality, and costs are low.

To learn more about Icon Health, visit www.iconhealthco.com.