Alegeus and HealthSherpa Partner to Provide Seamless ICHRA and Benefit Enrollment Experience
Alegeus, the market leader in consumer-directed healthcare (CDH) solutions, today announced a partnership with HealthSherpa, a health technology company that has created a simplified health insurance plan shopping and enrollment experience, to provide enhanced capabilities for its clients around the individual coverage health reimbursement arrangement (ICHRA). HealthSherpa helps ICHRA-eligible employees search for and enroll in the best individual plans, which will bolster the health reimbursement arrangement (HRA) experience from Alegeus and give third-party administrators (TPAs) and health plans a strategy for increasing employer and employee participation in health benefit accounts.
“The spiraling cost of healthcare continually challenges employers to provide higher quality, more affordable health benefits to their employees – this year perhaps more than ever due to COVID-19,” said Steven Auerbach, Alegeus CEO. “By partnering with HealthSherpa, we will empower our health plan and TPA clients to provide employers with an out-of-box solution that increases the flexibility of benefit offerings while tightly controlling costs.”
Introduced to the market last year and effective as of Jan. 1, 2020, ICHRAs are designed to allow employers of all sizes to fund an HRA for employees to buy individual market insurance instead of offering group coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ICHRA can also be used by employees to pay for out-of-pocket healthcare expenses. According to the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Treasury, once adjusted to the new rules, roughly 800,000 employers will offer ICHRA to pay for more than 11 million employees and their families – signaling significant interest and upcoming demand.
To support clients and empower them to remain agile in the always-evolving market landscape, Alegeus will integrate HealthSherpa’s technology with the highly configurable WealthCare platform for a comprehensive, well-rounded ICHRA enrollment and administration experience. Employees will access their ICHRA account through the Alegeus platform and use the HealthSherpa exchange platform to search for, purchase and enroll in their preferred health plan. This seamless experience provides a differentiator for TPAs at a time when employers seek a simplified, streamlined way to deliver benefit plans.
Specifically, the HealthSherpa integration will:
- Provide intelligent routing technology to give individuals the best shopping experience based on their ICHRA benefit;
- Offer plan selection services with decision support;
- Provide best-in-class call center services to facilitate enrollment;
- Deliver enhanced employer/administrator reporting;
- Process enrollment files and assign benefit amounts for ICHRA;
- Enable post-enrollment servicing and plan management.
“Since the introduction of ICHRA, we have successfully connected eligible employees to the best plans, based on their unique financial and healthcare needs,” said George Kalogeropoulos, HealthSherpa CEO. “We’ve enrolled more than 3 million people to-date and are excited to increase that number through our partnership with Alegeus.”