Exclusive: Aon partners with Solera Health to help employers manage ‘point solution fatigue’

Digital health company Solera Health is collaborating with professional services firm Aon on a tool to streamline benefits solutions and help employers better measure return on investment for the health services their employees use, HR Brew has learned exclusively. The companies announced the partnership on March 12.

Aon will integrate Solera’s HALO platform, a condition management tool it rolled out in September, with its own Health Risk Navigator, a proprietary tool that uses employer claim data to make recommendations based on health risks among specific employee populations.

The platform will let consumers view a variety of different benefits programs and health offerings in one place, including those Solera and other vendors offer. The tool will help employers better manage different “point solutions”—a term used to describe benefits programs designed to solve a single problem.

Through this collaboration, employers will “gain access to [Solera’s] ecosystem of a litany of solutions, and ultimately reduce this burden of contracting and managing a whole host of individual point solutions,” Kevin Fyock, North American innovation leader for health solutions at Aon, told HR Brew.

The problem with point solutions. Point solutions may cover virtual care, mental health support, or fertility benefits, for example. They typically seek to address gaps in healthcare systems, and may focus on specific conditions, according to a 2018 blog post from HR consulting firm Mercer.

The market for these benefits is crowded, and employers may offer their workforce as many as nine point solutions, according to some estimates. This can lead to “point solution fatigue,” a phenomenon in which employees become overwhelmed by the number of options available to them, and may give up on finding care.

Fyock also referred to the broader challenge of “vendor fatigue” when speaking about the problems employers encounter when they manage a number of different vendor relationships, as organizations must “contract and manage these different independent relationships.” He said the partnership with Solera is intended to address this challenge, as well as “low engagement” among workers and “ill-defined ROI” for employers.

Aon and Solera hope their collaboration may not only reduce the headache of navigating different health services available to employees, but also allow employers to more closely measure the return on investment of their benefits. “Solera’s utilization, engagement, and clinical outcomes,” coupled with Aon’s employer claims data, will allow companies to “monitor patients engaging with these solutions,” and may help employers “independently validate savings and ROI achieved by those results,” Fyock said.

Though the companies didn’t announce a launch date, he said Aon is already “actively bringing” the collaborative platform to organizations.