What is healthcare navigation?
You can look at healthcare navigation as having two parts:
Healthcare advocacy solutions offered by an employer help their people:
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learn about their health conditions and treatment plans,
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identify the best providers,
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help understand their benefits and costs, and
- get to the right level of support, at the right time, for their journey back to work after an illness, accident, or surgery.
In a fragmented healthcare journey, employees must call several individual companies for medical, behavioral, and pharmacy benefits. With healthcare advocacy solutions provide a single point of contact for all their benefits. This approach makes their healthcare journey simple and easy to navigate.
As reported by Forbes, 92% of healthcare executives understand the value of a highly personalized experience and rank it as a top strategic priority.
Many businesses also offer claims advocacy, a benefit that helps employees understand the basics of their benefit. Claims advocacy experts explain basics like out-of-pocket costs and deductibles while providing help in navigating frustrating billing problems and guiding employees through complex denials and appeals.
Claims advocacy is an essential service for today as medical billing is challenging even for those experienced in the healthcare system. As mentioned, when employees don’t understand their benefit, or get frustrated, they may simply forgo care, further inhibiting their ability to achieve better health and potentially impacting their financial well-being. It’s also an increasingly important benefit as some 50% of Americans reported medical debt in 2021; up from 46% in 2020. (Medical Debt Survey, debt.com)