Demonstrating Value of Insurance Benefits

Despite all the growth in Medicaid and the exchanges brought on by the Affordable Care Act, about half of all Americans still get health insurance through their employer.

By any measure, these employers feel they are spending too much on employee health benefits. And it is the human resource (HR) leaders who are given the impossible task of selecting, managing, and showing results for all the different benefits they offer, from weight loss to smoking cessation, telemedicine, wearables, digital services and more. But, those in HR have a difficult time measuring use and efficacy, as well as managing each of these individual offerings.

A startup called Jiff, with offices in both Mountain View and Oakland, CA, feels they can solve this with their enterprise health benefits platform. Jiff was founded in 2011 by Stan Chudnovsky (head of Messaging Products at Facebook and former VP of Growth at PayPal); James Currier (a partner at Ooga Labs and growth advisor at PayPal); and CEO Derek Newell (with 20 years of experience leading innovative health technology and service companies). This group’s experience in gaming, social media and platforms, and health care was leveraged to create Jiff’s engaging health benefits platform.

The Jiff solution brings together the best of digital health technology and services in a data-driven platform that allows HR leaders to improve employee engagement with their benefits offerings, manage all of them, and see what works. Jiff does this by delivering personalized incentives to the employees, providing real-time data analytics to the employer.

Jiff spends a lot of effort in their design to produce an exceptional user experience. In addition, Jiff targets individual employee cost drivers and increases utilization of those services proven to save money; basically, they succeed by delivering the right benefits to the right employees at the right time.

Jiff recently introduced three new product and services packages: Jiff Enterprise Navigator, Jiff Total Wellbeing, and Jiff Launch Pad. Each solution offers a different set of programs, features, and services, but all of these products attempt to motivate employees to engage with their health benefits.

With these new employer health benefits solutions, Jiff feels they can offer every employer a benefits platform that fits with their preferred vendors, health benefits design, and unique employee population with the overall aim to assist employers in controlling their health care costs and create a happier, healthier, and more productive employee population.

Jiff is currently experiencing rapid growth driven by adding industry-leading health apps, tools, and services, from Garmin to MyDietitian, as well as new partnerships with longtime HR giants Willis Towers Watson and Mercer.

Again, innovation, the topic of this continuing blog series, will be a big part of the solution to health care.