The Nava Healthcare Innovators Series - Rightway Healthcare

Nava is on a mission to deliver high-quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans, and that starts by partnering with the most disruptive and innovative companies out there who share our vision for a better healthcare system. We're shining a spotlight on companies that are deploying cutting-edge technology, experimenting with new business models, and redesigning the care model to drive towards better outcomes for employers and their employees. If you’re interested in partnering with any of the companies featured or want to learn more about Nava, reach out at info@nava.io.

The first installment of our Healthcare Innovators series features Jordan Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Rightway Healthcare. Read on to learn more about how they're improving how employees navigate their healthcare:

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Describe Rightway in 10 words or less:

Rightway guides employees to better health.

What was the lightbulb / eureka moment that led to the creation of Rightway? What's your mission?

While at Redbird Capital Partners, I spent a lot of time researching innovative players in the healthcare space and noticed that few were focusing on how patients were navigating healthcare. Having had the privilege of growing up with a father who is a physician, I recognized how important it was for me to have a doctor-in-the-family; not someone directly responsible for my care, but someone I trusted to ensure thatI was making the right healthcare decisions.

One day while I was grabbing lunch with my dad, a lifelong cardiologist in the Miami area, three people he knew stopped by our table to ask him a healthcare question. That’s when it hit me: others were seeking their own doctor-in-the-family, a trusted expert who knows the healthcare system who can educate them and advocate on their behalf.

I knew it was time to start a company that could provide that same doctor-in-the-family experience, but at scale. This moniker served as a catch-all for empathetic, compassionate, and educated support. The luxury of having a doctor in your family meant that the feelings of aloneness, uncertainty, and confusion that are typically associated with healthcare could give way to a streamlined, single source of truth and advocacy for a member.

This approach is still at the core of our mission at Rightway: to make today’s complex healthcare system simpler for our members. We aim to guide our members through every decision on their healthcare journey — advocating for them and making sure that they receive the highest-quality and most complete care at the most competitive cost.

What's the Rightway experience for the employer? And for the employee?

We work with each client to create clear goals and initiatives, helping them think about the value that they want to create, both for their employees and for the organization. Engagement and member satisfaction are central to the Rightway experience, and our team has developed a proven approach to increase those metrics.

Every Rightway member has the support of a dedicated navigator who functions as their own doctor in the family. Our navigators can match members with the right doctor, schedule their appointments, provide them with upfront pricing, and even dispute bills on their behalf. We’re extremely proud of our navigators: every week we hold a “mission moment” during which our navigators share how they made a difference for members that week. These experiences can include anything from helping members find the right specialist for their child to spending hours on the phone resolving incorrect bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The support and advocacy offered through the Rightway platform is designed to mirror the “doctor-in-the-family” experience. Our app reinvents the way a member navigates their healthcare, improving satisfaction while simultaneously reducing the total cost of care by making smarter, more informed decisions. Employees now have a single place to go for virtually all of their healthcare questions, which helps them become informed and educated consumers.

Our approach leads to an average Net Promoter Score of 80 and 40%+ engagement — a testament to high satisfaction. Concurrently, we see a significant reduction in healthcare costs for both the consumer and plan sponsor; in fact, Rightway yields an average ROI of 5X for employers.

The term "Employee Advocacy" has been around for a while, so much so that some employers may even approach the term with skepticism. How is Rightway's approach and solution different?

Our theory is that empowered members make better healthcare decisions. Rightway brings a new level of consumer empowerment through a single solution that supports, advocates on behalf of, and navigates a consumer through their healthcare journey. The combination of our high-tech solution with trained navigators who provide high-touch service is what makes Rightway different. We pair members with live, clinical guides (MDs, NPs or Nurses) who are dedicated to creating results —not a bot or an overseas hotline incentivized to get members off the phone as quickly as possible. This empathetic approach builds trust and improves outcomes – many of our members even know their navigator by name!  

On the back-end, we have an intelligent platform that ingests claims information and applies advanced analytics to identify high-risk and rising-risk members. Business rules create workflows for our navigators that enable proactive outreach to members, resulting in better healthcare outcomes and an additional opportunity to lower costs.

How can employers make sure they're extracting the most value for themselves and their employees when implementing an employee advocacy solution?

Educating employees about the services offered is critical to a successful Rightway deployment. Nava partners with Rightway to work off of an engagement playbook that involves multi-channel marketing campaigns that meet employees where they are — there is no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all" solution. We measure engagement over time and dial up the levers that are moving the needle for each particular client. Additionally, the team performs quarterly business reviews to share metrics and realign on goals and initiatives.

What's the biggest mistake you see HR leaders making when it comes to employee benefits?

A “set it and forget it” approach around the Open Enrollment (OE) period. While it is important to ensure that employees engage with their plans during OE, employers must understand that healthcare is a journey for their employees and challenges can arise at any time of year.

Ongoing support, education, and engagement are critical to ensuring that employees understand their benefits and know how to use them when the need arises. Rightway’s “always-on”engagement strategy includes monthly webinars and seasonal campaigns that increase employee awareness and education around wellness and preventive care and other segment-specific care gaps.

If every employee in the US had Rightway in their pocket, what outcomes would that produce in the broader healthcare landscape?

We would see a dramatic decrease in the waste and inefficiency that results from employees not successfully navigating the complexity of today’s healthcare ecosystem, as well as an increase in member expertise, efficiency and advocacy. This begins to chip away at the 40% of total healthcare costs that are generated from the wrong intensity of service (surgery vs physical therapy), the incorrect site of service (ER vs urgent care) and the suboptimal quality of care (readmissions, complications, infections, etc.).

Beyond lowering costs, healthcare consumers would finally feel less alone and frustrated in their healthcare journeys. Our navigators are constantly recognized by our members for their commitment and high level of service; they really appreciate having someone they feel is working hard to help them.

How do you hope to partner with Nava to drive healthcare transformation?

Partnering with Nava was an easy decision because of the close alignment of our goals. As a benefits brokerage, Nava has the ability to impact over 160M Americans who rely on an employer for their healthcare. Nava wants to identify and elevate the best-of-the-best in healthcare, and we both share the goal of optimizing experiences, costs, and outcomes for employers and their employees in a way that emphasizes simplicity, empathy, transparency, and accountability.

As we continue working together, we are motivated by the team’s energy to do right by their clients, which has been the driving force of Rightway’s success. As a native service within the Nava ecosystem, we can ensure that both clients and members have an excellent experience navigating their care and enjoy improved outcomes and lower costs.