Hundreds of digital health startups want to put their products on the job-funded menu of employee benefits.
Another startup wants to make it easier.
New York Brokerage Nava Foley Launched a search engine designed to help small and mid-sized employers buy digital health and benefits. The Nava benefits search engine, which officially launched on Tuesday, could also help digital health startups find markets for their products, said Nava co-founder and CEO Brandon Weber.
“If you talk to a lot of innovative digital health providers, they’ll say they don’t even have the opportunity to work with small and midsize employers,” Weber said in a Zoom interview.
However, it was the challenges facing employers that drove the search engine in the first place. Weber said Nava, a health insurance brokerage founded in 2019, has heard from human resources professionals that it can be difficult to sift through the range of ancillary benefits that employees receive.
It’s a serendipitous process that professionals rely on Google searches, advice from peers and referrals from brokers, Weber said. “There is no single place to get unbiased peer-reviewed information.”
Nava starts building a place.
After more than a year of development and beta testing, the Nava search engine has about 600 benefit providers in areas such as telehealth, fertility, addiction, and mental health.Vendors on the platform include supplemental health insurance companies Brera Insurance Telehealth service provider OneMedical and Nursing Navigator The right way.
“We’re excited to see this transparent marketplace launch, and we look forward to seeing the impact it will have on HR leaders and the people they serve,” Kara Kubarych, vice president of partnerships at Rightway, said in a statement.
The marketplace gives HR professionals access to detailed product information, as well as pricing and peer review. Professionals can also conduct custom searches of products available in their area for companies like theirs.
“They’ll be able to do it in minutes where it would take days, weeks or months today,” Weber said.
Nava plans to continue adding suppliers and has developed a relatively simple onboarding process, he said, adding that the search engine aims to be “the largest directory of benefit suppliers on the Internet.” The market could eventually include thousands of suppliers.
But the company doesn’t measure success solely by size. Nava also wants to ensure that the information is impartial. As a result, search engines don’t follow a paid model where vendors can influence rankings, Weber said. The company also has no plans to sell data on professionals shopping at the marketplace.
“It’s the exact opposite of what we’re trying to do here,” Weber said. “We’re trying to build a deeply trusted community.”
For vendors, Nava is committed to ensuring reviews are fact-based and targeted to the latest version of their product, similar to the Apple App Store, Weber said. “We took cues from some of the best e-commerce markets and some of the more sophisticated software markets.”
Another benefit of search engines is greater price transparency, which reduces costs over time, Weber said. Webb said the site is not expected to generate any revenue anytime soon. Right now, the benefit lies in raising awareness of Nava, whose core business is to bring the efficiencies and cost savings of large employer health plans to small businesses.
“We want to be the center of the modernization of this market,” Weber said.
Photo: Nava
