This session draws on new research from Employee Benefit News and Quantum Health to reveal how employees and HR leaders view today's healthcare benefits—and where the disconnects lie.
We'll explore:
- What's Being Offered: A look at current benefit designs and how well they meet employee needs.
- Trust in the System: How trust (or lack of it) among insurers, employers, and employees impacts benefit engagement and outcomes.
Transcription;
Michael Green (00:09)
Good morning, everybody. I just want to be clear, my name is Michael Green. I'm a Senior Director of Research at Employee Benefit News. I will not be breakdancing today, just to be clear. You can thank me later for that. Today we're here to talk about the state of Healthcare 2025, and I'd like Alicia and Michelle to just do a brief introduction.
Alicia McNamara (00:31)
Great. Alicia McNamara, I'm the Vice President of Client Engagement at Quantum Health. If you're not familiar with Quantum, which I'm sure most of you are, we're a navigation and advocacy partner specifically for Mag Aerospace and 400 other enterprise clients across the US. Great to be here.
Michelle Johnson (00:51)
My name's Michelle Johnson. I'm the Senior Director of Total Rewards and HR Operations at Mag Aerospace. I've been working in total rewards, HR, and benefits administration compensation for just about 15 years, all in the government contractor space. I focus on building benefit programs, strategy, and designing and partnering with groups like Quantum Health and a lot of other organizations to make our benefits better for employees. So I'm the client up here.
Michael Green (01:18)
Thank you both. Before we get into this, I want to talk a little bit about the research itself. We'll be sharing some results from Employee Benefit News' annual State of Healthcare research that was conducted in partnership with Quantum. This is the third year we've done this research. Each year we've surveyed employers and employees to get a balanced perspective on the needs shaping healthcare benefits at companies across verticals and of various sizes, from small to enterprise-sized companies. The surveys were fielded in March and April. This year we had 156 HR benefits decision-makers reply to the employer survey, and 501 eligible benefits employees complete the employee version of the survey. The employee portion was balanced to match the US employee population based on gender, generation, and race. The goal of the research was to explore the benefits offering, trends, need states, and the role that trust plays in the benefits landscape. So before we dig in, I'm going to ask Alicia to just talk a minute about why Quantum Health was interested in partnering with Employee Benefit News on this research.
Alicia McNamara (02:27)
Absolutely. And thank you so much again for having us. We really partnered with EBN because we wanted a balanced view of the benefits landscape for both employers and employees. It's really not enough to know or understand what companies are offering. We need to understand how those benefits are experienced among employees, where the gaps are, and what really builds trust within the benefit ecosystem. EBN obviously brings credibility and reach, as you mentioned, and with this data, we're able to ground ourselves in facts and data and provide insights which can help employers design strategies that really control cost and still deliver meaningful, affordable healthcare experiences for people, which is why we're all here today.
Michael Green (03:26)
Fantastic. Let's dive in. Alright, surprise! Cost remains a key focus for employers when making benefits selections—not a huge surprise. 79% of employers have said that in their most recent annual benefit cycle, company cost is a top concern. This has been a consistent finding for this research over the past three years. It's important to note that affordability ranks high for employees as well, with more than four in 10 workers reporting that they rely on company-provided benefits to help them afford healthcare. Healthcare benefits can also be a factor in employees' decisions whether to leave or stay at a company, and that ranks among the top five factors, as we'll see on the next slide. So getting this right matters to employers beyond the bottom line. Given healthcare is a shared cost, employers have to grapple with costs from two different angles
delivering cost efficiencies to the company, while also optimizing the benefits that deliver the most value to employees at an affordable price point. So Michelle, how are you thinking about this at Mag Aerospace, and how has your approach changed at all in recent years?
Michelle Johnson (04:35)
I think we've all had a very busy couple of years in the benefits landscape and HR, especially with the pandemic and kind of the pre- and post-world that we all live in. So for Mag, when I came to Mag, there was no real HR department. There was definitely no benefits person. So I kind of started with developing that three-year strategy. You build out a program and you say, first assess, year one; year two, you start to build and replace. We start to get the folks in there that we need for our employees. And year three is when you start to see that change really evolve. Year three of my time at Mag was right around the pandemic. So then it was time to really change because we had to. Telemedicine was starting to become popular, but there was still lots of hesitation, especially if you have a higher generational gap between your employees and different things that they might have priorities for.
(05:38)
So when I think about how we approached our strategy over the years, it changed pretty dramatically, first because we had to. And then it was more like, okay, how do we put that ownership on our employees? We don't give our employees enough credit. It is not their job to know what out-of-pocket max means day-to-day. It's not their job to know those things. But as you build your strategy, you need to be able to develop and start to look for the right partners for your company and what makes sense for your culture. My culture at Mag Aerospace—I don't know about you guys, I'm excited to hear more about all of you and where you're from—but we are military-based. When I came to Mag, we were about 80% veteran, 90% male. You get the idea of where I'm going with this. Everybody was kind of like, "Okay, we need what we need, and let's move on and focus on the mission." So putting things in place that helped enable our employees to have the best programs for what they needed—that's really how our strategy shifted. And we started looking into navigation services—how do we support our employees? And that's where Quantum came in, along with other different types of services, to really build out the programs for what we needed, what our employees needed, not what the industry needed.
Michael Green (06:54)
Great. And so Alicia, how is Quantum Health helping companies address this challenge, which is optimizing costs for employers while delivering affordable and comprehensive healthcare to employees?
Alicia McNamara (07:04)
Yeah, Michelle's going to elaborate a little bit more on this particular topic and how we partner together. But at Quantum Health, we recognize employers are under pressure to reign in costs, but also while cutting costs, trying to provide that comprehensive and quality care that employees rely on. And really, that's why our navigation model is designed to create measurable value on both sides of the house. So we think about employees and we think about employers, which is specific to cost savings to the business and affordable, comprehensive care for your populations. We really ground our strategies in facts. Independent actuarial analysis shows that our platform delivers around a 6% average claim savings in the first year and then grows to about 15% in claim savings by year five. These savings come directly from reducing unnecessary utilization, preventing avoidable claims, and ensuring employees make informed choices about where they get care and how they get care.
(08:20)
The one thing that I hear often is, "How do you prove that?" We're very different in our ability to prove exactly how we drive these savings. We have a new capability, which we call Action to Impact, and there's a fabulous webinar out in the world right now on this. It's powered specifically by AI, and I know that's all the buzzword these days, but also 26 years of proprietary data and basically millions of interactions with employees and members that are utilizing the plan. We can tie every single meaningful interaction that we have with these employees—whether it's redirecting to in-network, reducing utilization, avoiding unnecessary ER visits, I can give you thousands of examples—back to both the employer's bottom line and to the members' out-of-pocket costs. So we are demonstrating both savings to the employer as well as savings to the member.
(09:22)
This level of transparency allows employers to see what's working, where the barriers are, and really how to optimize their plan design. One other additional component to Quantum is our real-time intercept model, and that really ensures early engagement. We capture about 86% of members before they hit a high-cost claims month. We don't consider a high-cost claims month to be $100,000 in spend; it is $10,000 in spend. So we are engaging early and we are engaging often, and really it's to ensure that they're guided to the right care at the right time. That means less friction, less frustration, better health outcomes, and lower costs. And then lastly, one other thing that is really important is the member experience. We are consistently measuring how we're interacting with employees. We do this by utilizing a member NPS, and our member NPS consistently stays around 60 to 70. If you're familiar with the industry, a carrier's NPS is around 30. So we are like a dog with a bone with that. We want to make sure that they have incredible experiences. I hope that answered your question.
Michael Green (10:45)
Fantastic. So we can move on to what benefits companies are investing in. As everybody knows, there's a lot to consider when choosing where to invest your benefits dollars; getting the right mix involves trade-offs. So where are companies placing those bets today? The eye chart over here, I'm going to go through this a little bit. For table stakes benefits—things like health, dental, vision, supplemental life, long-term health, or long-term care—they're largely being offered at consistent levels over the past three years of the research. A number of newer benefits, like access to telehealth, paid parental leave, and access to mental healthcare supports, show sustained traction over time. But this year, we saw some shifts in the other direction, with fewer companies offering access to digital health tools, prescription insurance, and healthcare navigation. For example, in previous years, we've seen about 70 to 80% of companies reported offering those specific benefits to employees. And this year, for the first time, it's dropped slightly to around 60%. This is particularly notable for the prescription insurance since so many employers indicate this is well-utilized by employees. So question for you, Michelle
one year, does it make a trend? It's possible the data could rebound, but I'm curious if you have a perspective on what might be driving this small downward shift for benefits like prescription coverage, healthcare navigation, or other digital health tools, or are you actually seeing an increased investment in these areas at your organization?
Michelle Johnson (12:21)
When we first were discussing this data, I found these data points really interesting because I'm not seeing that at Mag. We are of course familiar with the industry. I have colleagues with partners and spouses who work in all different types of organizations who have come to me and said they're seeing this. The data doesn't lie; companies are shying away from these programs. I can say that at Mag, I'm not doing that. I'm not pulling back from everything that we've kind of built over the years just because we started it off building it because we had to. It makes sense long term. My employees are busy, they have jobs to do, we have high-stakes contracts. 95% of our employees are direct bill. That means we have a job to do, and their job is not sitting there and worrying about their insurance, how they're going to pay for something, how are they going to get that appointment that they can't get, and all those different things.
(13:16)
So I consciously have chosen to continue with the programs that we've put into place, and we've actually enhanced them. So we actually started off with Quantum Health, and we'll kind of get into it a little bit later, but how we built out the full self-insured benefits plan design. But when we started out with Quantum, we knew it was a commitment. I talked about how I came to Mag and I had a three-year plan. Every three years I have a new three-year plan because you've got to give these things time to work. And I can tell you that cumulative savings year over year—Alicia can talk about the numbers and the data—and I can tell you as their client, we are seeing that in our claims data. We are seeing only a 7% increase in our medical claims from this point this year to this point from last year. And a lot of that is due to just inflation, cost of living, cost of products, cost of prescriptions, as we always love to talk about. And we're not seeing the actual things that other companies are seeing where employees are getting more hyper about how they're going to the doctor and doing those things. We have a plan, we have processes, and we built this over the last—we are closing up on year three. I love my threes, right? So closing up on year three with Quantum Health, and we are seeing the results that they've talked about, and the ROIs are amazing, and my employees are more educated. So what I'm seeing is that by consciously making an effort to continue these programs that we've put into place, don't give up.
(15:03)
It's really easy to face that pressure from your finance teams, your C-suite, outside brokers, vendors, everybody coming at you with ways to make your plans better. Stand your ground. You guys were hired for a reason. You're here to do this job and work with your partners to really develop a program that works for your company and your employees. So don't give up, and we're seeing results. I can talk all day about how great it's been, but in reality, the numbers don't lie. We're not seeing claims impacts the way that other companies are seeing them.
Michael Green (15:39)
Excellent. So Michelle just touched on this. So Alicia, question for you. A topic that comes up frequently in these conversations is the challenge companies are having delivering the right mix of benefits for a workforce that can span four or five generations in some cases. So layering in the acceleration around virtual and digital health during the pandemic, it's easy to see why choosing the right benefits and the right partners to serve that employee population for many has led to an explosion in point solutions and point solution fatigue. Alicia, what advice do you have for leaders who are grappling with this challenge?
Alicia McNamara (16:17)
Yeah, I think we've been talking about point solution fatigue now for two, three years. I'm going to ask for audience participation for one second. How many of you have more than five point solutions in your ecosystem? Just raise your hand. How many have more than three? More than just one? Okay. I
Michelle Johnson (16:46)
Have two.
Alicia McNamara (16:46)
You have two. Okay. I typically see anywhere between two and six point solutions across our market. You're right, employers today are being asked to meet very different needs across a diverse workforce. We talked about the different generations. Younger generations are requiring more tech-enabled options, where tech-enabled builds trust, which then allows for the phone call for a more meaningful conversation. But we also have to focus on the Baby Boomer population who wants to pick up the phone and talk to a human. And I think you mentioned it, during the pandemic, organizations rushed to layer on point solutions. A lot of what we saw was virtual care because people were not going to the doctor. They were investing in telemedicine, they were investing in MSK solutions. I'm seeing a lot of investment in COEs lately, and I'm also seeing a lot of benefit and plan design changes with regards to mandatory utilization before bariatric surgeries or before total knee replacements or before total hip replacements.
(18:02)
And so that causes a lot of ambiguity and confusion for your employees. "Who do I go to for what thing? Who am I supposed to talk to to understand where to go?" While well-intentioned, it often led to a fragmented benefits experience, and employees again, didn't know where to turn. Independent healthcare navigation can help companies solve that challenge by serving as what I call the connective tissue or the single trusted point of contact for members. Some people call it the quarterback. I actually have a client who calls it the control tower. So pick your poison. Instead of employees having to navigate that maze of apps and vendors, our model really makes the experience simple and personal, and we connect members to the right resource, whether it be a point solution, a digital tool you've invested in, or in-person care, which many people are starting to go back to.
(19:05)
Additionally, we're starting to see a lot of members utilize or over-utilize the ED for inappropriate conditions. We can help redirect that utilization and make sure that it fits the member's unique need. The EBN study revealed that employees overwhelmingly want human support. While we talked about the younger generation wanting digital tools at their fingertips and interaction, typically what we see is that digital tools start to build the trust. "Hey, did they answer my chat question correctly? Did they give me a comprehensive picture of my benefits? Did they direct me to the right place?" As soon as you can build that trust, that's when you get that... when they're going through a really complex healthcare journey, they're
(19:57)
going to pick up the phone, and that's when we get them engaged in care case and disease management, and so on and so forth. Independent healthcare navigation blends technology with compassionate human-centered guidance. For employers, the advice is to focus less on adding more programs and more on making the programs you already have accessible and connected. When you simplify that experience, you not only reduce point solution fatigue, as you mentioned, you really maximize the ROI of your benefit strategy and deliver a healthcare experience that employees trust and consistently use time and time again.
Michael Green (20:39)
Excellent. Now we're going to talk about healthcare navigation specifically. The research shows 60% of employers are offering employees a healthcare navigation solution. And after paid sick leave, paid parental leave, supplemental mental health supports, and company-provided wellness, this is among the top five benefits companies are paying in full for employees to access. Michelle, why did Mag invest in healthcare navigation, and can you talk a little bit about what it's delivered?
Michelle Johnson (21:06)
We started working with the healthcare navigation idea in 2022 for a 1/1/23 plan year. So we're closing in on our third year, and when I say that's when we partnered with Quantum, it wasn't just Quantum that we brought into the mix. I still remember in my benefits career sitting in a room with my C-suite, with my bosses, with everybody, and saying, "Okay, we're going to call this the rip the band-aid year." Healthcare has changed, life has changed. COVID changed everything. You've got the younger folks who really want quick access to digital tools. Then you've still got your Baby Boomers, you've still got the older generations that want that person. How do you find that mix for your company? So I sat in that room and said, "Okay, this is what we'd like to do. We're going to go to that full self-insured model." And we, with Quantum as the center, brought in Quantum to say, "Okay, Quantum's going to be our healthcare navigation tool, right? They're going to be the ones that the employees call." We use UnitedHealthcare, UMR, but the phone number on the ID card is not to UMR, it's to Quantum. So our employees have one number. We have a carved-out PBM, still one phone number. They have a website, it has Mag in the URL. Our employees aren't calling UnitedHealthcare and getting put on hold and doing all this stuff. They're calling an organization that knows our plans, has a specific group assigned, and they're working with them. So in the same year, I did it all. We pulled in healthcare navigation with Quantum, we carved out the PBM, we went independent. I told you it was rip the band-aid.
(22:45)
I was like, "If we're going to do this, we're going to do it." And then we started the real push to educate our employees. I started a new model of smart healthcare consumers. "You own your healthcare. We're all here to help you." But I told them like, "Pick up a benefits guide every once in a while, guys. We all spend a lot of time making those little pictures look perfect, right, in your benefits guide," but there's so much information there. And hold your employees accountable. So we did all those different things. We also brought in a group called HealthJoy, which I don't know if any of you are familiar with that, but they are a healthcare concierge service with a full telemedicine suite. So not only making these things available—so investing in these programs, making them available for our employees—but making them... money talks,
(23:28)
guys. If you tell your employee, "Hey, yeah, you can go to your primary care, and you can do this, or you can call them, and you can have your primary care visit be virtual, and they'll send you a scale, they'll do all those things," and we committed—and somehow I convinced them that this was the right move for us—that we were... but it's a marathon. And I hate that expression, "It's a marathon, not a sprint," but it is. That's what we chose to invest in. And that first year, I will tell you right now, it was rough. As a benefits leader, I had to sit representatives from four or five different navigation-type companies—not just that, but Benefit Communications, the carrier, PBM, Quantum HealthJoy—and I sat them all in a room and said, "Okay, guys, I know you're usually sort of competitors, but I need you all to work together. Your customer is our employees, and Quantum is your centerpiece." That's the person that's going to call and kind of triage as necessary. And I will say that first year was rough. Employees are like, "What's a Quantum?" And they're like, "This sounds fake." I got a lot of just blank stares. And there were a lot of jokes about it. Then they said, "Well, who do I call? Do I call HealthJoy? Do I call Quantum? Do I call UMR? Where's UMR? What do I tell my doctor?" That first year was tough, but you've got to get through it, and it has paid off. And now, three years in, Quantum is a household name. Our employees know what it is. It's helped with our onboarding employees. They talk to each other, they know, and it's really something that employees trust. They're going to see and they may not like.
(24:59)
All this data shows, I think we're going to talk about it a little bit later about trust. That's a big thing for me because my customers, my employees, advocate for them. And that's where we saw the real build of a strategy. And I told the team, "I'm like, we're committing to this. We're pushing people into the HDHP. We offer huge matches on the HSAs. We make their premiums cheaper. We have a wellness program with a 30% reduction." Show your employees that we take care of our employees who take care of themselves. That's my tagline that I created, which is really dorky, but now it's everywhere, and I can't get away from it. But yeah, so we take care of employees who take care of themselves. I'm like, "You make the effort, I'll make the effort."
Michael Green (25:38)
Excellent. So Alicia, why do you think companies are willing to invest in healthcare navigation? You talked a little bit about the benefits, but
Alicia McNamara (25:46)
I think I've talked about them a lot. But to Michelle's point, there's also some investment on the employer side. Quantum and independent navigation wholly can bring together your entire benefits ecosystem and really act as that connective tissue and that quarterback. But there's also an educational component to your employees about what is navigation, how can they help you? You've got to direct them to that single point of contact in order to get them to start to utilize your benefits more effectively. If you can do that, independent navigation addresses all of the concerns that we talked about, which is controlling the rising healthcare costs. I think Michelle specifically, I've seen a 4.5 or 5-to-1 ROI over the last three years for Mag. You all spend millions each year on health benefits, and without guidance and without that connective tissue, employees often under-utilize all of the valuable programs that you're investing in. Healthcare navigation changes that dynamic, ensuring employees again, get the right care, at the right time, in the right setting, the right point solution, the right partner. And that's specifically why employers invest in us today.
Michael Green (27:16)
Yeah, I was going to say,
Michelle Johnson (27:17)
Can I add to that? I think about it, too. When you think about your employees, and I just listed off how many different groups that we partner with. When I showed that slide to my C-suite, it was like, "Here's all the partners." But then what the employees see is one. They have one ID card. They have one person that they call, and that person is going to help from start to finish. So selecting a strong healthcare navigation tool is important. As an employer, you have that responsibility that you pick the right group because navigation is helpful, but the whole purpose of it is you're trying to simplify things for your employees because benefits are complicated. It is very complicated. We all don't get enough credit for that area of HR. But selecting that right program, and that's why I was thinking about it when you were saying, I'm like, "Oh yeah," I kind of said, "Oh, we have all these companies," but it's like the employees, they know what they know. They know that there are different people, but it takes strategy, and it does take a little juggling in the background. Absolutely. I have wonderful brokers, I have a wonderful team. We all work together. But selecting that navigation company so that make sure your employees just see, "This is who I call. I call one number, and they help me with everything."
Michael Green (28:28)
The research shows solid engagement from employees with healthcare navigation. Six in 10 employers that offer healthcare navigation benefits report that their employees are also making use of the healthcare navigation, concierge, and advocacy benefits. So now we're going to talk about trust. Health trust, or the lack of it, impacts benefits, engagement, and outcomes. There's a lot of industry research that shows a strong correlation between patient trust and their healthcare providers and improved health outcomes. Those sources often state that when patients trust their providers, they're more likely to adhere to treatment plans, engage in preventative care, and have better overall health. So trust leads to higher utilization and better outcomes. But what are the sources of trust, and how are they shifting in an increasingly digital and AI-fueled world? And what can employers do to provide employees with the information and support they need to navigate their healthcare journey?
(29:26)
Two interesting things came out of this research. First, the research shows that when employees need information about their health insurance or coverage, they're increasingly turning to the internet, family and friends, a benefits consultant within the company, or a care advocate or coordinator to help them navigate their healthcare system. Second, the level of trust varies across parts of the ecosystem. Companies can actually influence at the top of that list. Among sources trusted most are healthcare navigation services. Michelle, how do you build trust with employees when you introduce new tools or new solutions to help employees understand and use the benefits and to get cost-effective, high-quality care?
Michelle Johnson (30:09)
I know I've said it, but it takes time. You have to be patient with your employees and also trust yourself to kind of know what the culture is, what the company is, and advocate properly for your team. We all get those outside pressures. I don't know how many of you—I mean, I can do audience participation—how many of you have to report your needs to a finance team, a CFO? For all of us, we're all sitting in that room. And are there any finance people in here? They're great. I'm not saying anything bad. Finance people are great. Finance people are great, but we all know they want you to put your solution in, and they want to see that ROI in six months, and that's just not realistic. So stand your ground. You tell them, and that's what I did. I'm like, "I told them, we may not see that first year. Employees are going to be annoyed."
(30:59)
They're going to be like, "Well, how come they get this and I don't get that? I don't want an HDHP. I don't want this." And yeah, that first year is noisy, but you trust your employees and you educate. I'm extremely accessible to my employees. I look at them as they're my clients. I always have time to talk to them. And that's what we do, right? At the end of the day, we are human resources professionals. We do want to be there to advocate for employees, but also even if you can't get your employees to trust the man of insurance companies and all of these people, you can get them to trust you. And that takes time and everything. But I'd say what I'm doing on a regular basis is just listening. Listen to what the employees want, listen to what they need, be a reasonable person so that when I have to give them news that they may not want to hear, it comes differently than when it comes from an insurance company.
(31:54)
Even when it comes from a Quantum, you're still their person, and continue to be that person. That's how I've built personally built trust over the years. And I understand it takes—I mean, I'm talking seven, eight years I've been with Mag, and they know me. They know that I'm in there for their best interest. But that's what you kind of have to do is even if you're new, if any of you have been with your organization less than two years, just be there. Listen, don't be hidden behind "Dear Insurance Company." They want to hear from you. Your employees trust you, they work for you. So I'd say that that's the biggest thing from an employer perspective on building trust with your employees
is actually be that person that they can trust. And that's how we've been successful, because when employees came to me and said, "I don't know what to do here,"
(32:37)
I didn't just punt them over to Quantum. I've never done that. I've never said, "Oh, call Quantum." It's just not my style. I talk to them, I hear their issue, everything. And then, based on the severity, I either say, "Okay, I want you to call them. I'm going to follow up with them, too." I work with my account management team. Or I'm not going to say I do it for them, but if it's a severe case, you're still their advocate, and connect them personally. Do that. You guys remember the term warm transfer? We all love it, right? The warm transfer. You kind of ease them into it. And I mean, I've got stories that I can share. Probably not right now. I don't think we have enough time, but lots of stories of employees who their opinion has turned around in a matter of days on Quantum, on an insurance company, and everything, because you just have to guide them. You just need to get them in the right place.
Alicia McNamara (33:28)
I just want to layer onto this. We're not going to show this slide, but when you look at the trust that employees have in their insurers, it's actually the direct inverse in the data. I think Blue Cross Blue Shield is the most trusted. So if anyone has a Blues plan, I guess you're a little successful in the trust bucket. But all of the other major insurers are again, showing inverse numbers. Frankly, I don't know that a lot of insurers are offering navigation and advocacy solutions that are tied into the health plan model. And I know it looks very attractive because a lot of times it's a more affordable option, but it's still the health plan, and it still doesn't have that independent third party, "I'm here to advocate on your behalf." They still think, "Okay, you're the health plan, and you don't want to pay my claims." So while investments are being made on the health plan side, we're still not seeing that trust kind of correlate.
Michael Green (34:38)
I have another question for you, Alicia. You touched on this earlier. So in an increasingly digital and virtual health ecosystem, let's talk about the value of having a human in the loop, and how can companies ensure that they're tapping into the best digital and virtual solutions while still delivering that human touch?
Alicia McNamara (34:55)
I think what we're finding is the right model of healthcare navigation blends that digital component, that innovative, that tech-first component, but also with that human-centered support. I already mentioned in the statistics, 90% of people said they want to have the ability to pick up the phone and call a person. For employers, the key is to view the digital and human support as complementary and not competing with one another. You need to have both in order to be successful. Technology should extend access and scale personalization and really provide actionable insights. But the human touch builds the trust, it reduces the friction, the frustration, and it drives engagement. We see at Quantum, on average when we're engaging with a person, it's seven, eight—I've seen even 50 to a hundred times, depending on how complex the healthcare journey is. So it's not just a, "I'm going to get my health insurance card." It's multiple touches where we're interacting with that particular person. When both are present, employers not only optimize their benefit strategy, but they deliver the kind of healthcare experience that employees actually want to use.
Michelle Johnson (36:17)
And you don't want to lose sight of, I think, making sure your healthcare navigation company has that clinical side as well. Because I know, I don't know if for those of you who aren't familiar with Quantum, the clinical side matters, too. Getting that clinician in there and having somebody that the employee can talk to. They're not just calling some customer service person. The person that they call, they're going to help them triage, but then there are doctors, nurses, everybody looking at the claims. They're advocating for the employees. They're reaching out to them when they see a claim come in for a questionable mammogram or something like that. They're reaching out to the employee, and they're starting that advocacy early. So I think the clinical side—make sure that any healthcare navigation company you have has a really strong clinical side.
Michael Green (37:05)
Great point. Excellent. So this has been a great discussion. Thank you both for sharing some of the insights you shared with us today. We have in the final few minutes. Let's have any closing thoughts. Alicia, I'll ask you again. You jump in.
Alicia McNamara (37:19)
I think just I'll say employers don't have to choose between controlling costs and delivering compassionate care. Independent navigation allows employers to see exactly how every interaction translates, again, to both bottom line savings and improved member experiences. And having that one connected tissue, quarterback, control tower, to your entire benefits ecosystem simplifies the member experience. So they don't have to think about, "Who do I go to for what?" All I need to do is call the one number on the card. All I need to do is use the one app on my phone. And it really helps streamline and drive better engagement, better utilization of your entire ecosystem.
Michael Green (38:02)
Thanks, Michelle. Any final thoughts?
Michelle Johnson (38:04)
Definitely. I think the biggest thing is from the human perspective
benefits are not one-size-fits-all. We all know that what worked for Mag and has worked for me and my employees might be very different than what would work for yours. I'm very aware I work in the government contracting industry. It's very different than your private employers, all those different types. But network here this week. This is the time to talk to other people, because how often do we ever get to see people like us, right? When you hear HR, everybody thinks of the HR business partners. They think of HR administrators. They think of hiring, firing. They do not think of us. They're not thinking of HRIS operations, total rewards, and those sides. So it's not a one-size-fits-all, but the biggest thing it comes back to is talking to your employees, knowing your employees. You are their advocate.
(38:51)
So listen to what they need and what they say, and still be that gentle reminder that sometimes it is what it is, right? Sometimes your claim won't get approved. Sometimes it's too experimental. Sometimes that appeal won't work. But adding that human touch to it, you are the humans in the room. So I always just say my final ideas and thoughts on any of this, any conversation I have with other benefits professionals, is you're their advocate. So do the job you were hired to do. You're the subject matter expert in the room. Our C-suite is very, very good at everything that they do, but they're not experts in the field; you are. So use that to your advantage, and get to know your employees, see what they need, and build your plans around that.
Michael Green (39:37)
Excellent. Thank you. If anyone wants to see more of the research results, you can use the QR codes on the screens to download the EBN editorial report on the state of healthcare research. Thank you both. This was great. Thank you.