Silos are the silent killer in your organization.
When wellness benefits programs aren’t integrated into a unified experience with health care, engagement suffers and employees don’t make the most of the programs that are available to them — which means they’re not as healthy and productive as they can be. These silos are no joke.
How do you ensure that your population gets the information it needs? How do you cross-promote programs and benefits so you’re speaking with one unified voice? How do you remove friction from the process of delivering employee health and well-being?
The answer: You bring everything together into a single, integrated platform. You might call it a “holistic hub.” At Rally, we call it the future of employee health.
Rally’s platform is evolving to simplify the bewildering array of benefits available to your employees by offering a unified experience for health and well-being programs. The platform will combine and enhance our existing Rally Engage and Connect offerings into a single solution, while streamlining the overall health experience for all users.
While a one-stop-shop health management platform can vastly simplify the experience for your employees, it’s important to understand the difference between promoting relevant programs to users, and truly removing the silos on the back end. We believe it’s important to do both.
Let’s look at our new vision for improving the delivery of health benefits, and what it can mean to you.
1. Creating seamless experiences
The health benefits ecosystem is fragmented.
On the back end, benefits leaders face the challenge of juggling various vendors, apps, providers, PBMs, and other data sets. Meanwhile, on the front end, employees struggle to make sense of a disconnected mix of user interfaces, logins, notifications, and records. To streamline health care, you need a hub that can fix the front-end navigation and the backend silos of data.
However, most digital health solutions in the market today are able to help only with the front end: promoting the right program, helping users to find an in-network doctor, giving employees details about their health plans, etc. This is a critically important set of capabilities, but it delivers only part of the solution.
Instead, imagine being able to find a doctor, price and pay for the doctor’s services, and schedule an appointment — all in one place. Now imagine the platform also knows that you’ve signed up for a weight-loss program at work that calls for regular checkups, so it won’t double book you for a doctor’s appointment when you’ve already made one yourself.
It would also drive employees to take real steps toward improving their health by linking well-being programs and incentives to actual care actions (selecting a primary care provider, scheduling appointments, filling prescriptions, getting diagnostic tests, and more).
And, of course, everything needs to work cross-carrier so you have to market only one hub to your population. The result is major improvements in employee outcomes, cost reductions, and higher return on your health investments.
2. Enhancing the employee experience
According to the smart folks at Deloitte, leading global organizations now see developing an integrated focus on the entire employee experience as one of their top priorities.
While HR sometimes views culture, well-being, and productivity as separate issues, “the employee sees the picture differently… employees look at everything that happens at work as an integrated experience that impacts daily life in and outside the workplace, including overall physical, emotional, professional, and financial well-being,” according to the report’s authors.
As employers look to improve the recruitment-to-retirement loop, there’s a growing need for holistic solutions, giving rise to consumer-centric digital platforms that can guide people through their entire health care journey.
Our new end-to-end platform is simplifying the process of finding care, pricing services, scheduling appointments, and even paying for them. By integrating workplace wellness programs, health incentives, scheduling, payments, and patient records into one place, we are transforming how employees are getting the care they need to stay healthy and productive.
This is critical for companies because as the Deloitte report succinctly put it: “A productive, positive employee experience has emerged as the new contract between employer and employee.”
3. Improving awareness and personalization
Consolidating all of your benefits information across various departments, locations, programs, incentives, and employee cohorts into one convenient hub means your people aren’t spending a ton of time trying to sift through different websites and multiple systems. What’s more, by integrating care recommendations and outcomes as we’ve done within the new Rally platform, you can nudge your people to take meaningful care actions — all in one place.
It’s the same model that’s made Amazon so enormously successful. Today, the e-commerce behemoth sells more than half a billion different products on its site, and finding virtually any physical product you need and getting it to your doorstep in two days is as simple as making a few clicks. The right health management platform should do for health care what Amazon did for online retail.
At Rally Health, our aim has always been to simplify health. Because health care is confusing for many consumers, we know that people don’t always use it in the most efficient manner. For example, some people don’t bother picking out a primary care physician, where they can get consistent care. Or, they go to the ER when they can go to an urgent care center instead.
This is where a unified platform can really drive positive member outcomes by leveraging data and consumer-centric design to simplify the health journey. By putting everything in one place, designing it well, and making it smart and personalized as Amazon has done with e-commerce, you make health care easier to understand and access.
On Rally, we’ve seen how this has led to some impressive, needle-moving results:
- Rally users decreased visits to the ER by 10 percent and increased visits to more moderately priced urgent care centers by the same amount, for a savings of $53 million.
- With Rally, 46 percent more patients found primary care providers (PCP), compared with patients without access to Rally, and 57 percent more found high-quality doctors matched to their needs.
That’s the value of giving people highly relevant information that drives them to make smarter care decisions, resulting in better outcomes for employees and lower costs for employers.
Bringing it all together
Something powerful happens when you bring together all of your well-being programs, allow people to find and pay for the care they need, and track their progress, payments, patient records, and incentives — all within the same platform.
Your marketing and promotions get easier. Employees are better informed, more likely to participate, and crucially, more likely to take real action toward better health. Employers will see lower costs, better business performance, and higher return on their investments.
All of this happens when you have a platform that goes beyond improving site navigation and consolidating benefit information. It happens when you have a platform that can actually break down the silos inherent in the current benefits ecosystem.
It happens when you have a platform that offers personalized recommendations and also makes it simple for employees to take the relevant actions without ever leaving the platform. That holistic health journey is what more and more employees expect from their employers.
Now that you’ve read about our vision for the future of employee health, let us know your thoughts. Email us at hwb@rallyhealth.com.
Eric Mann heads up marketing efforts for our key partners. He has more than 20 years of technology and health care marketing experience, leading browser marketing for Netscape and product marketing for Oracle Health Science.
