HR leaders, it’s not just you — the benefits buying process is absurd

March 21, 2022

Donald DeSantis

Summary

"It often feels like buying a used car, or trying to rent an apartment in a popular NYC neighborhood — the other parties have all of the information, while I’m flying blind, up against a deadline and need to make a decision."

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Why is this so darn complicated? So many options, nowhere to go.

Funding for digital health start-ups totaled $14 billion in 2020 -- nearly double compared to 2019. That means that dozens of new benefits companies are popping up every single week. It turns out no one is able to keep pace with this explosion of new benefits providers. Brokers struggle, HR professionals struggle, even VCs struggle to stay on top of who the latest providers are.

With this high volume of new vendors joining the benefits space, this already complex buying process is getting more complicated by the day. And we all have more questions than answers. “Do these providers work with companies of your size?” “Do they operate where your employees are?” “Do they work with fully insured health insurance plans?” “Do they offer in-network reimbursements with your insurance carriers?” No one, not even the largest benefits brokerages in the country, has done an effective job of staying on top of this.

The result? In every benefits buying process, you have to start from scratch. You turn to Google and search, hoping that something relevant pops up. You ask your broker for recommendations. You message HR groups you’re in for advice. The HR groups are great, but all that institutional knowledge disappears into “the feed” over time. Your broker only recommends what they’re most familiar with. And Google only shows you which vendors are good at getting onto the first page of Google.

The problem is we’re lacking a central place to start our benefits search. We need an unbiased place to search and get feedback from peers, without the worry of funny-business and pay-to-place schemes coloring what they’re seeing.

Last year, Nava started collaborating with members of the HR community to fix this problem.