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

Review Summary
- InsureTech
- UX/UI Design, AgileDev Development, ClickModel Prototyping, Website Design
- Health Plan Decision Support Platform
- Maine, USA
“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.”
Caitlin Forbes—Vice President, Marketing and Strategic Partnerships, MyHealthMath
An InsureTech SaaS startup obsessed with delivering personalized results turns a validated proof of concept for a health insurance plan decision support platform into an automated, fully interactive, user-centric application with human support that enables it to scale not only its business but trust and empathy as well.
Summary
Every year, more than 90 percent of U.S. employees roll over their health plan. MyHealthMath partners with employers, brokers, and carriers to empower individuals to make informed decisions about their health benefits, saving them time and money. Through its platform and live support, it offers an efficient, personalized approach to helping companies choose their health benefits and employees choose between different health plan types based on their health insurance histories.
A startup in the InsureTech space, MyHealthMath previously had relied on telephone-based customer interviews and live support but had developed its own web-based survey platform in response to demand from clients and partners. The system, built internally, had a limited user experience and functionality. They needed an app that could replace a phone conversation and provide a fast, efficient experience while still maintaining the intimacy of human interaction and protecting users’ privacy.
MyHealthMath initially engaged Praxent to design the app and provide a clickable prototype, style guide, and avatar. However, they had such a phenomenal experience they decided to contract with Praxent to ensure the development of the final product was to the same standard. Finally, they worked with Praxent to update their website to reflect the same modernized look and feel like their new design-led platform. From concept to product, the entire engagement lasted just eight months.
Now as a result of having a fully automated, user-centric, mobile responsive health plan decision wizard, MyHealthMath is able to serve more users, scale its partnerships, and target larger health carriers and other distribution partners. It maintains its personalized approach through a modern, simple UX/UI combined with human support. In addition, its customer success team has not received a single question about how to use the new app, which has freed them to focus on providing more personalized education and support to employees and clients.
“There’s a night-and-day difference in my own experience in terms of people’s reaction to [the new system]. It enabled us to make more sales. Hands down, no question about it. … 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.”
Bob Watterson—Founder and CEO, MyHealthMath
The Problem
MyHealthMath was looking to design and develop an online decision support platform that would provide individuals with a personalized guidance about which health plan option is right for them based on their unique histories and circumstances. Given a tight budgetand timeline (eight months from concept to planned launch), they needed a partner who understood the industry and could get up to speed quickly.
Having worked extensively in the InsureTech and health benefits spaces, the Praxent team was able to take a complicated system with thousands of data points and make it simple, personal, and user friendly. In addition to providing branding expertise, Praxent was able to expand on the client’s vision of user experience and how employees would share their health information and understand the reports that were delivered to them.
Scaling the Business Model
The proof of concept validated the need for MyHealthMath’s product across employers, albeit through a manual, customer-service-intensive process. An automated, user-friendly experience was needed to enable scale and remain profitable while maintaining their focus on customer support.
User-Centered Design Approach
With health insurance being so complex, MyHealthMath wanted to take a user-centric approach to the design, ensuring it was both informative and simple.
Trusted Delivery Partner
While initially only engaging with Praxent to design the experience, after working with the team MyHealthMath decided to contract with Praxent to ensure the final product was of the same standard.
Modernized Marketing Site
Because the platform had a modern design to match its improved user experience, the client needed a refresh of its marketing site to better reflect the finished product.
“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.”
Caitlin Forbes—Vice President, Marketing and Strategic Partnerships, MyHealthMath
How We Helped
Praxent’s mission was to design and develop a product and marketing site that would help MyHealthMath to scale its personalized approach to health plan decision support and improve the customer experience based on a validated MVP. The end result was an automated, self-service, decision-support platform for employers and employees that offered a dramatically improved UI/UX but still enabled the company to maintain its personal touch.
The approach included:
Branding
- UI Design
- Digital Style Guide
- Branding concepts
UX Strategy
- Branding workshop
- Competitive analysis
- Subject matter expert Q&A
- Lean user testing
- UX design (mobile responsive)
- Wireframes
ClickModel®
- Development ready, interactive prototype
Website design
- Homepage design
AgileDev
- Developed the mobile responsive web app
Project Management
- Roadmap planning, backlog grooming, and weekly meetings to touch base on scope, budget and timeline
- Provided high-level overview of the project by major milestones and feature interdependence in order to keep senior stakeholders in the loop
Before
After
Results
The Praxent team’s work kept to the client’s tight launch timeline while coming in significantly under budget with overwhelmingly positive reviews of the initial product.
MyHealthMath has seen a dramatic increase in application usage (now 95% up from 85% the previous year), and in both participation and pull-through rates. Sales have also increased. Across the board, from prospective clients to current distribution partners, people who went through demos or used MyHealthMath’s previous platform absolutely love the new platform.
Since launching the new platform, MyHealthMath’s customer success team has not registered a single support call from a user about how to use the application.
“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.”
Bob Watterson—Founder and CEO, MyHealthMath
“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.”
Caitlin Forbes—Vice President, Marketing and Strategic Partnerships, MyHealthMath
Key Deliverables
- HIPAA Compliant Health Questionnaire (Decision Doc) to securely gather information from the employee on their current circumstances, medical history, and previous insurance usage
- Decision Engine Integration connects the new frontend experience to MyHealthMath’s backend decisioning engine
- PDF Health Reports enables customers to get a PDF copy of their results, analysis, and recommendation upon finishing the questionnaire
- New Marketing Website to promote MyHealthMath’s product to benefits administration companies
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.”
Are you ready to dramatically improve your customers’ digital experience by modernizing, rather than rebuilding, your legacy software?
Schedule a free, no-obligation consultation today
Schedule a callJoin other insurance industry clients who are innovating within constraints to improve their users’ digital experience.
Not sure if you’re ready to start your project?
Check out our free guide, and set yourself up for success right now.
DOWNLOAD
The Four Reasons Software Modernization Fail
(and Twelve Strategies for Success)