As an employer, Dan Hartman, executive director of Morgan Health, is definitely noticing point solution fatigue. In recent years, many startups have been coming to employers with their tools that address one specific challenge, leaving the latter and their employees overwhelmed by the number of apps they have to manage.
What Morgan Health is looking for are solutions that can work well together, Hartman said Wednesday at MedCity’s Invest Digital Health conference in Dallas.
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“I think from an employer perspective and a customer perspective, what we look for are the partners that can play well with each other and integrate into the broader ecosystem,” Hartman said.
Cris Ragusa, director of payer solutions at telemedicine solution company TytoCare, agreed that employers are having a tough time managing point solutions. About 50% of organizations are working with four to nine digital health solutions at a time, he declared.
“That’s difficult for the HR departments, that’s difficult for the patients, who obviously have a journey that’s challenging and sometimes overwhelming,” Ragusa said at the event.
Additionally, when working with a lot of point solutions, the data for each user is siloed, he said. That makes it hard to understand healthcare insights of employees because all the information is separate.
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But more point solutions entering the field isn’t necessarily a bad thing, argued Tammy Sun, CEO and co-founder of Carrot Fertility, a fertility benefits company. The competition forces startups to really prove their worth to employers.
“What it has done is put pressure on solutions to make their ROI very, very clear and a lot sharper,” Sun on the panel. “In order to rise above the noise and the cacophony of various things being pushed through to the employer in the channel, you really have to spike on value.”
But how can point solution fatigue be remedied?
One company battling this issue is Accolade, a benefits and care navigation platform. The startup partners with different digital health companies — including Carrot Fertility — and helps navigate employees to the correct care, said Morgan McHugh, vice president of customer success at Accolade.
“From an Accolade perspective, we are one of the solves for this,” McHugh said on the panel. “How do we navigate people to all of these different solutions? How do we put together a trusted ecosystem that employers can tap into, contract through, procure through so they don’t have to go out and do all that work themselves?”
Despite the challenges to navigating all the point solutions, the panelists were optimistic about the future of health tech for employers.
“In a lot of ways, it’s forcing companies to get scrappy again … and develop partnerships and think through how you get in the door with customers,” Hartman of Morgan Health said.
Photo: shylendrahoode, Getty Images
