Is It Possible for a Health Plan to Simplify Access and Engage its Customers?
Healthcare plans are easy when one doesn’t need to use them, but navigating a plan to receive needed care can prove challenging. Ryan Coplon, Co-Founder & President of HealthWallet, believes there is a better way to make order out of the healthcare chaos, and that’s through HealthWallet’s smartphone app. He spoke with Kevin Stevenson about HealthWallet’s unique approach to giving people the healthcare access they desire when they need it.
Coplon’s background comes from the employee benefits and health plan architecture, and that experience shaped his ideas on ways in which a better health plan program could benefit those in need of options. “We realized the more progressive we got with our plan design and infrastructure, the more confused our plan members got,” Coplon said. “So, I saw an opportunity to partner with my co-founder now, in collaboration with the health plan that we managed.” After a year of development, they created an easy platform to drive utilization at the plan level. Once their idea solved these issues, Coplon and his partner recognized the potential to mainstream this idea.
The goal for HealthWallet is to help those looking for care from their health plans cost-effectively gain access to that care. And their app’s design makes getting that information to low-cost solutions easy and convenient. Coplon said they predicated HealthWallet’s platform on two concepts: consolidated access and engagement strategies.
“We are an intentionally flexible and modular platform,” Coplon said. “As it sits today, we have upwards of 80 mutually exclusive member-facing end-point solutions that we toggle between and cluster together as a function of relevance. We get to work collaboratively with our health plan clients and our health plan administrators to aggregate a perpetually relevant suite of solutions.”
