BRINGING A MODERN CONSUMER EXPERIENCE TO HEALTH INSURANCE
Health insurance can and should work like the other useful services in our modern daily lives. We should have first dollar coverage and a marketplace-like experience where you have choice and cost clarity, so you can see and compare treatment options side-by-side. One where you can make care decisions that fit your individual needs in real-time—through an intuitive experience that is clear and flexible and personalized. All from the palm of your hand. Delivering this kind of experience required a complete redesign of health insurance. In 2016, I asked a group of health care industry veterans to help me take on the challenge. We had seen many of the so-called disruptive insurance ideas coming out at that time—most of which stuck a modern tech stack on top of an antiquated health insurance chassis. Those iterations didn’t fix the root of the problem. We knew we needed to start from scratch— to fundamentally redesign health insurance to deliver a better, more personalized experience. That’s how Bind was born.
Bind also got rid of fuzzy math and financial barriers like deductibles and coinsurance that are confusing and often prevent people from getting the care they need. Instead, we offer clear, upfront prices that are easy to understand and compare. Further, our prices are based on the belief that high-quality treatments and providers should cost less. Employers can improve health and attack waste by incenting employees to choose the treatments and providers that demonstrate better outcomes.
Bind app
Finally, we believe health plans should be personalized to individual needs. With the right infrastructure and consumer engagement in better health care decision-making, employers can improve subsidization for things they know are important to their unique employee population. It enables the opportunity to improve access to mental health screenings, for example, or make the cost of childbirth more affordable. Behavior and treatment history can be used to take personalization to an even richer level. That would make it possible to lower an individual’s costs for treatments when clinical evidence suggests they’re effective for that person. We are building a future where a health plan can truly deliver a diverse and inclusive benefit—an experience that’s very hard to offer when plan design is one-size-fits-all.
Tony Miller presenting to Bind employees.
THE PRINCIPLES OF BETTER DESIGN
So, where do you start? We started by designing health insurance around how people actually use care. People really don’t look for doctors, hospitals and drugs—the things traditional health insurance is designed around. The way consumers actually think about health care is: I have a condition or a health need. Knee pain, for example. They want to know, what are the treatments that can help me solve my condition? And how can I most effectively source it from the care marketplace? We tapped into the rich data the health care industry has collected to create an infrastructure and experience through which people can easily find more effective and efficient methods to solve their health conditions. We call this a condition-first plan design.
The Innovators: Bind | 25
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