Nava Appoints Health Policy Expert, Surgeon, and Bestselling Author Dr. Marty Makary as Chief Medical Advisor

Nava, a modern benefits brokerage on a mission to bring high-quality affordable healthcare to all Americans, today announced the appointment of Dr. Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H. as its Chief Medical Advisor. In his role, Dr. Makary will offer clinical guidance and perspective that will guide how Nava vets, onboards, and deploys innovative healthcare providers on behalf of its employer clients. Dr. Makary will also partner with Nava on its benefits offering aimed at small-to-midsize companies, with a focus on driving increased transparency and accountability of benefits providers.

"Partnering with Nava enables me to deploy my clinical expertise at scale to employers who don't benefit from the massive teams or corporate budgets to navigate and evaluate the expanding universe of healthcare providers." - Dr. Marty Makary

A professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Carey Business School, Dr. Marty Makary is a public policy researcher focused on the re-design of healthcare, medical appropriateness, and health care costs. Dr. Makary has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Medpage Today. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today. He is a New York Times bestselling author and recipient of the 2020 Business Book of the Year Award for his book The Price We Pay. Dr. Makary has extensively studied the revolutionary effects of transparency and accountability on healthcare, with a focus on helping employers and their employees manage healthcare costs.

“Over the course of my 20-plus year career, I've studied how the healthcare system's broken incentive structure has led to spiraling costs and declining outcomes for both employers and their employees,” said Dr. Makary. “Benefits brokers are a critical part of our healthcare landscape, as they influence, decide, and manage the healthcare benefits of over 170 million Americans who rely on an employer for medical insurance. Partnering with Nava enables me to deploy my clinical expertise at scale to employers who don't benefit from the massive teams or corporate budgets to navigate and evaluate the expanding universe of healthcare providers.”

“Nava is on a mission to bring high-quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans. Central to achieving this mission is deploying the best innovation in healthcare delivery and benefits design directly to small-to-midsize employers, so they can make better healthcare decisions at scale,” said Brandon Weber, Nava co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. “Bringing Marty on as our Chief Medical Advisor is a big step in that direction. Nava can now give these employers access to world-class clinical thinking that had been previously reserved only for America's biggest employers. Marty is a leading health systems thinker, clinician, and employer advocate, and I'm excited to work alongside him to curate the best innovation in healthcare, and then effectively deploy that directly to the employees we serve through our benefits offering.”

Since Nava’s launch in 2020, it has delivered small-to-midsize companies significant savings on their 2021 benefits plans, all without reducing benefits for their employees. To achieve this, Nava has established the Nava Benefits & Healthcare Advisory Council, which democratizes the insights, technology, and best practices of the country’s largest employers into a unified service offering called NavaBenefits+. Dr. Marty Makary serves on this council alongside benefits leaders from some of America’s largest and most successful companies.