Automated decision support platform enables InsureTech startup to grow while maintaining personal touch

Client Testimonial

The Problem

BOB WATTERSON “We help both the employee and the employer get more value for their health insurance purchase. We create efficiencies so that everybody wins. But it’s complicated. People have so much to do every day, and that creates inertia with plan choice. Something like 90% of U.S. employees renews in the same health plan year over year because they, understandably, don’t have the time or support needed to better consider their options. So that’s where we come in, being able to break that inertia and get people to think about this and then help them efficiently go through a decision support process.

“We first built a system that actually connected with individuals by telephone. We did that for two years. We had thousands of these discussions, and we built our first version of an online platform because people wanted that. It had a limited user experience; you went through the forms and then got emailed your report.

“Our business model is based on the fact that we want to offer the most personalized decision support in the healthcare business so that we build trust with those individual consumers. We want them to know that we’re acting in their best interest, that we don’t have our finger on the scale in any way with the calculations, that we’re really leading them to, you know, what’s called in the financial world best execution to get there. And we back this up with a personal touch. We have what we believe is a world-class system with an online experience, but if [people] have questions, they can connect with a live person, and they can also ask questions about the output they get from this. We want to have unquestionably better personalization in our system versus our competitors.

“When you talk to people about their health needs; it’s intimate. Our people and our system needed the right combination of an empathetic listener—whether it’s our online system or the way that we make people feel—and efficiency.” 

CAITLIN FORBES “So much of what Bob’s talking about is the trust that we build with consumers. With decision support, it’s all about building trust. We need employees to trust our guidance and feel empowered to choose the right health plan. In the past, we built trust really well through phone call-based interactions. But it wasn’t sustainable, because we needed to have an application that could grow quickly and reflect user wants for an online experience. But how do you build trust around what is such an intimate decision through an app? That’s what we wanted to build with Praxent.”

Why Praxent

CAITLIN FORBES “When we were looking at Praxent, we were looking for somebody that could help us build that trust and translate it—take that trust and empathetic aspect that are so important to us and move it—to an online application. And that’s not easy to do, especially when you’re thinking about health and financial information. It was really important to find a partner that could take the heart of what we do as a company and [help us] do that online in an application. That’s really what drew us to Praxent.”

BOB WATTERSON “We had a very warm feeling about Praxent from the get go. Just with the people that were there, we kind of felt this connection, empathy and wanting to help.”

CAITLIN FORBES “We knew a huge part of we needed involved the design, the UX/UI, so we were looking for a firm that had really strong design chops.

“Praxent was fantastic because they have worked in a similar space to ours. They were in health benefits and InsureTech, so that’s one of the big reasons we were drawn to them. And then once we started working with them, they helped our vision evolve. That was one of the things that made them so great to work with: they were really thought partners with us. When we started, we gave them our vision about what we wanted, and then, they’d come up with new ideas like a sidebar editor and clickable graphs—those are just a couple of examples of how they helped us grow our vision.”

The Solution

CAITLIN FORBES “One of the things I would say is just how quickly they got up to speed on health benefits. If you have ever had to choose a health plan, I’m sure you know that it’s complicated, and the health care system in this country is tough for the average person to navigate. And so, if you’re trying to build a system that takes all these pieces behind it—thousands of data points for each person— and make it user friendly, there’s a lot going on. So we knew it would be challenging to get a partner up to speed. But Praxent picked it up so quickly, and then helped us take our vision further than we expected. They came up with these amazing ideas about ways to make this experience personal and user friendly, making it so that you feel comfortable on the platform.

“We started working with them early in Q1 of 2021, and we were looking to roll out the updated product in September of 2021, as well as new branding. This was a super speedy timeline. And they had this visionary mindset, taking what we were thinking to another level, specifically again around user experience and how employees would be sharing their health information and understanding the reports that we deliver to them.”

BOB WATTERSON “These guys are pros.’ Your team made such good points to our team about each decision, and our team was very confidently able to say to me, ‘This is the way it should be done.’ And then the proof’s in the product. We have a really good user experience.

Project Management

“Kevin Hurwitz was a great partner. At times, we were worried about deadlines and I had a phone call with Kevin and he met us where we were, [and took us to where] we needed to be with resources and commitment. We’re trying to manage this with a budget that we have because we’re a small business. We were able to do that in a reasonable way and I felt that Praxent was a great partner to us in that circumstance.”

CAITLIN FORBES “I honestly think every person on the Praxent team who was there from the beginning with us deserves a shout out—Doug, Karen, Rico—all of the people that made this project a reality. We were handling some pretty insane deadlines, all during a pandemic, and we couldn’t have gotten this project off the ground without the efficiency, flexibility, communication, and kindness of this team.”

Results

BOB WATTERSON “Caitlin and I work together on sales and strategic partnerships. And the reaction to what we do was night and day. Now having Decision Doc to show, almost 100 percent of the time [people say,] ‘Hey, this is a really cool system. We’re excited about this.’ The user experience is night and day. That ability to demo the system and get the sale? Night and day as well. So that proof point is there; we’re very happy with it.”.

“It also dramatically increased our participation and pull through with consumers. We’re not finished measuring all that because we’re not done with the fall open enrollment. But we are obviously able to measure along the way, and we have significantly higher participation this year. Decision Doc is absolutely the central reason for that.

CAITLIN FORBES “We have a pretty high renewal percentage. All of those renewal calls were on the previous platform. We were doing demos for them with our new platform, and across the board, fantastic feedback. People were super excited.

“Every aspect of the sales journey, from new sales to renewals to the customer success team, we are getting really great feedback in terms of year-over-year comparisons. Also, with our larger partners … some of them have been with us for years, so they’ve grown this partnership with us, and it’s definitely really good feedback. We’ve also had employers – HR teams -reaching out to us and sharing positive experiences with the platform.”

BOB WATTERSON “You know, another thing I’d add to this is a year ago during open enrollment, we were running at 85% using our app versus the phone interview. This year, it was 95%-plus using the online system. Talk about something we can do today that we couldn’t necessarily commit to [before].  We can scale now, which is obviously always a vision with a business that touches consumers. We want every employer and every employee in the United States to use our system. That’s a big goal, but one that we maintain, and now we can do it.”