Ep #494 Connecting Employees to Crucial Resources: Insights from Ashley Reid of Wellist

Speaker 1: 0:00

What's being done to help employees connect to the right resources at the right time. We'll find out on this episode of Shift Shapers.

Speaker 2: 0:10

Change either energizes or paralyzes. The choice is yours. This is the Shift Shapers podcast, bringing the employee benefits industry interviews with individuals and companies who are shaping the industry's shifts. And now here's your host, david Saltzman.

Speaker 1: 0:31

And to help us answer that question, we've invited Ashley Reed. Ashley is founder and CEO at Wellist. Welcome, Ashley.

Speaker 3: 0:39

Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:40

Oh, it's our pleasure. Tell us a little bit about your backstory. How do you get to be doing what you're doing?

Speaker 3: 0:45

Yeah, so I started my career in marketing. I bought media for big ad agencies like Duncan and Fox and literally did email and direct mail campaigns at Staples selling paper and ink early in my career.

Speaker 3: 1:02

So my first jobs were really in nuts and bolts, consumer marketing and activation.

Speaker 3: 1:07

I went to grad school when my mom had cancer and then after that I sort of fell into what still feels like my real job, which is big corporate strategy and business development. I was at Bain Company and Bridgespan and then spent five years in global transformation and corporate strategy roles at Phillips Healthcare and while doing that work was really convinced that hospitals were going to require better tools to support patients outside of their four walls. And when I was leading strategy for the $3 billion home health business division, my best friend's father died of cancer. She went into preterm labor within 24 hours of her dad dying and I was like there's this thing called the internet, it shouldn't be so hard. So we originally built a company in the patient care space helping cancer patients connect to the right resource at the right time, built that business to 550 hospitals across the country until COVID hit. And I'm really excited to be able to expand our business to help employers get more value from their existing point solutions and, in doing so, identify opportunities to optimize their benefit spend.

Speaker 1: 2:19

So let's talk a little bit in level set for the audience. What is the problem that Wellist goes after and tries to solve?

Speaker 3: 2:26

Yeah, so in 2024, employees have more well-being needs than they ever have. Secondly, these employers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on benefits to try and address those needs, and there are really great solutions in the market in 2024 to help people thrive, manage complex conditions, address mental health challenges. However, when we look at the data, three out of four employees aren't connecting to support and the CFO is saying where's the value? And so when we double click into this problem, a lot of it's about how employees get connected to these resources, and we have a solution that can help address that.

Speaker 1: 3:12

So can you give us a real life example?

Speaker 3: 3:16

Yeah. So we had a client in the middle of a pandemic who was on the patient side, and they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on benefits and were, at the time, throwing a lot of money behind mental health resources and child care for their care teams, and what we saw was that the nurses started hacking our patient programs for support themselves, even though that resource existed and was being provided by the health system. And so, when we got curious about this problem, what we learned was for a nurse to actually access these resources and support, she had to double authenticate into a VPN at the end of her shift. She had to click 12 different web pages to get to a site that listed most, but not all, of their benefits, and they were all organized by vendor. Here's a link to the health plan, here's a link to Virgin Pulse, here's a link to the EAP, so on and so forth.

Speaker 3: 4:18

So the nurse had to know what she wanted, know how to get to the page, and then, now that she is in it, she has to go find it in each of these point solutions, and so, as a result, as you might imagine, most employees actually don't ever get connected to the things that they need, and so what our solution does is it pulls that information outside of that ecosystem and, whether it's on their mobile device, on a digital platform or via our call center that accommodates 200 languages, the employee can now just tell us what she wants.

Speaker 3: 4:51

I am a 36-year-old breast cancer patient and I live in this zip code, and the product can mine every little thing buried in each of those point solutions that would be relevant to her, as well as what's in her community. So this could be a nonprofit that will come in and clean her house for free, regardless of income eligibility, because she has breast cancer, or food services or mental health resources or yoga classes that are specific for people with her diagnosis, and so those resources are buried not only in our partner's existing ecosystem, but also in the communities where these employees live.

Speaker 1: 5:35

Now, is that an automated AI type intake, or is that person to person, or is it a combination of both?

Speaker 3: 5:41

Yeah, so this is what we have that no one else has. It took us a decade to be able to write the algorithm, to be able to do this at scale. One benefits leader compared it to Chipotle, where he's like it's mass customization. Do you want a burrito or a bowl? Do you want one of these three salsas?

Speaker 3: 6:02

And so we use AI on building the content to present to employees. So we use AI to do what we do as an organization faster, smarter, better. But we never, ever use AI to assume we know what you need, because the reality is, if I'm pregnant and you're pregnant and another colleague is pregnant, the full suite of our needs is going to be very different, because I might have three children, you might be managing an aging parent and somebody else may have limited financial means, and so what we see in the data is employees come for one or two things that they know they need, but they end up getting connected to 8 to 15 resources because of how the product is laid out. And so we never, ever, ever use AI on the front end, because it allows us to address the full sweat of needs, not just what the common denominator might be.

Speaker 1: 7:00

That's interesting. So, from an employer's standpoint, what's the impact of a service like this other than, obviously, employee satisfaction? Is there a financial impact to it as well?

Speaker 3: 7:11

Yeah, and it comes on a number of different sort of milestones. So within two months, as part of our implementation process, we're able to identify where are you double paying for things, where are there gaps in your portfolio. And so there was a major food company and I said why are you paying for the call map? You already get that for free. It's buried both in your health plan and this other partner, and so there's some direct redundancies. There's areas where they may have resources that they weren't aware, and you know that two months in, before you even go live, so you can use that information to optimize your benefits investments. Then, at six months, you actually start getting the data back on. What do employees want and need?

Speaker 3: 7:55

An example here would be a client who had invested in two child care benefits because they wanted to make sure that they were supporting the full set of demographics in their organization, and we actually looked at the data. What we learned is that only 45% of employees were using the benefits when we augmented with community resources. 55% of the time they preferred that benefit, and so they didn't have to pay for both benefits options. They could actually reduce the cost but still provide more choice for employees. And then at a year we get to like the big dollar numbers.

Speaker 3: 8:34

So we had a client who had invested, for example, in a surgical carve-out. That addressed saved them $10,000 for everyone who used it Prior to going live. Only three people had used it the previous year. So our ability to optimize the engagement, both in the digital platform and in the activation, means that we're not just getting three people in. We can tweak things and see how they behave to know that we added 27 new people to that total and that's, as you might imagine, for that one benefit alone, $270,000 to the bottom line. And so Wellist has the ability to take this precision resource matching platform, turn it into data that actually helps employers optimize their benefits spend and reduce their costs.

Speaker 1: 9:23

I was going to ask, since you brought up data which is, you know, on everybody's lips these days, is actionable data what do you provide to an employer group and how frequently is that available? Is it an on-demand piece or is it a regular reporting? What does that look like?

Speaker 3: 9:38

Yeah, it really depends on different clients In the standard offering.

Speaker 3: 9:42

Most employers are getting it on a quarterly basis, but it is, you know, because we have the only self-service tool that can do this.

Speaker 3: 9:51

We have the only data that actually shows what people do in the privacy of their own web browser and addressing sort of the full set of well-being needs, and so the benefit is I can tell you not only what are employees needing, I can tell you how are they behaving, how are they shopping, what are they filtering on, for example, like mental health resources for children who might be cutting, or I have an addiction and need something that's offered online at my home but I can also then tell them what do.

Speaker 3: 10:27

Did they like it and did they? Would they like it and did they? Would they recommend it to a colleague? And so the beauty of this is not only do I have this information at scale, but that I can then cut it by how are the needs of my employees under the age of 25 different than my employees with cancer, different than my Hispanic employees? And so it gives employers just next generation intelligence to understand how do they address the full suite of well-being needs for their employees, as well as how can they reduce their costs and optimize their limited financial resources in these benefits portfolios.

Speaker 1: 11:06

Do you find that, as you deliver that data on an annual review basis, advisors and their clients are making changes to their plans of benefits?

Speaker 3: 11:14

Yes, absolutely, and it really. They don't even have to do it on an annual basis, right? We get this information in real time, and so the ability to not only use that data on terms of what do you, how do you reduce your costs, but also how do you optimize engagement. And so there are, as I alluded to, most organizations right now are trying to manage the costs of their chronic conditions. They are seeing their healthcare costs go up, and so our ability to use their real employee data month over month to tweak the activation campaigns, to get, for example, we get diabetics, not when they're losing their foot, we get diabetics when they come for meal delivery and are searching on diabetic-friendly meals and can walk them into those diabetes programs upstream. And so the ability to monitor that data in real time means that not only are we going to see cost savings on renewal, but we're also going to be able to tweak the engagement to sort of exercise more fiscal control throughout the year.

Speaker 1: 12:21

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Speaker 1: 13:02

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Speaker 1: 13:47

This episode is sponsored by MZQ Consulting, a concierge compliance firm that excels at making the complex simple. Have you seen the news lately? Johnson Johnson is being sued because J&J's health plans failed to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs. In the case of one drug, the plan paid $10,000 for a drug that regularly is available for under $80. Not only were the members of the benefits committee named personally, but their benefits advisor was also named in the suit. And that, dear listeners, is why you need a top-flight compliance firm. Yes, mzq handles all the usual compliance stuff, from ACA reporting and tracking to RAP documents, 5500s, mental health, nqtl and QTL analysis and a whole lot more, but the heat is being turned up on fiduciaries who don't act like it.

Speaker 1: 14:40

In this environment, using an ERISA attorney-led compliance consulting firm is your best strategy your clients too, and MZQ Consulting is where you should go For more information. Go to wwwmzqconsultingcom or email them today at engage at mzqconsultingcom. Now back to our conversation. You know it's fascinating. With the Johnson Johnson lawsuit, we're talking a lot more now about fiduciary duties and fiduciary responsibilities. It seems as though having a tool like this goes a long way to being able to say, yeah, we're looking out for the best interest of the plan and how we spend money and what we deliver to employees. Is that a part of your conversation, or does that not so much enter into what you guys do?

Speaker 3: 15:29

Yes, it really depends on the call point right. So if we're talking to the chief people officer, it is absolutely one of the core reasons why they're buying our product, which is look. The reality is, our benefits are typically a top five or top 10 benefits spent for these organizations, and three out of four employees are not using the resources right, and so it's an easy place to look for value in a resource-contrained environment. When we get to the benefits leader level, where they're really trying to optimize, how do I do more with less? That is less of a driver. Really, what they're focused on is I have worked really hard to put together this amazing portfolio and why is no one using it? And why is everyone calling me or saying you know, writing on Glassdoor, you know our benefits, we don't have this, this and this and it's right here, and so at the I would say total rewards or benefits executive, they're less focused on the fiscal control. They're much more focused on activation, engagement and employee support.

Speaker 1: 16:34

When we talked earlier, you mentioned a couple of things that really kind of perked my attention. I'd like you to kind of delve into them a little bit. One of the things you talked about is demographically and clinically buried information. Yeah, in a practical sense, what does that mean?

Speaker 3: 16:50

Yeah, so let's take an EAP. Eap utilization rates are usually like one to four percent. Most people associate them with like six hours of counseling for life events like divorce. The reality is there are for most of these, these solutions, 300 resources buried in their programs. But another example would be one of our clients best hearing aids are in their vision plan.

Speaker 3: 17:19

If you ended up on that page looking for hearing support and the things are organized by a vendor, you're not clicking on IMED, right, and so what we do?

Speaker 3: 17:29

Or we have built over a decade a backend that allows us to go in and, first and foremost, itemize every little thing both buried in the point solution but also in their partners, and then also go in and tag it.

Speaker 3: 17:44

So this is for a caregiver, this is for emotional well-being, this is for substance use disorder, this is for smoking cessation.

Speaker 3: 17:53

So that now if I come in as a user and say you know I need meal delivery and home cleaning and oh, as I'm looking at this list, here are the eight other things that might be relevant to me, and you then give me information about how old you are or what your condition is, we can not only show you take a new parent, for example, the things you asked for.

Speaker 3: 18:19

So you might have asked for child care, so we can give you the exact details of the child care at your site of employment. Or maybe you need financial assistance. We can connect you to those programs. But we also can then tag all the other little things that might be a breast pump, it might be a weight loss program, it might be a call center staffed by nurses specific for new mothers, buried in the health plan that no one knows it exists, and so our ability to write these clinical taggings, not just to a subset but to the exhaustive universe of every resource that's buried in the existing portfolio, as well as in these local communities, is the unique asset that took us a decade to build.

Speaker 1: 19:01

Now, the other thing that you said that kind of my ears perked up was you were talking about whole person support. I think you've touched on that a little bit, but maybe not under that kind of a label. Would you explain what that is and why it's important?

Speaker 3: 19:14

Yeah, it's important because one of my former colleagues who was a nurse said you can't expect a nurse we were talking about clinical teams at the time to give a five when she's a three, and in 2024, our people are very frequently our product right. And so, whether you want to or not, if I'm stressed about managing children at home or managing a sick parent or dealing with my own mental health challenges, that's my problem because, at the end of the day, it impacts how I perform at work. Let's stay with the nurse example. Am I going to show up for my shift? Can I manage the scheduled surgeries? Am I increasing the risk of medical errors?

Speaker 3: 20:07

And so in 2024, like it or not, we as employers are now responsible for trying to address these things that prevent us from basically providing the highest quality people, the highest quality products or services to our end customers.

Speaker 3: 20:25

And so the reality is, employers can't afford to address all of those things. Right, I can't afford. Let's take nurses 25% of nurses are leaving because they can't manage their work and their life. When we look at, for example, data from one of our early pilots, what was really interesting was seven of the top 10 categories that employees most frequently connected with were outside the benefits portfolio. They were these resources in the community. So our ability to help nurses with things like grocery delivery, home cleaning errands and tasks pet care first and foremost helps her stay in her job because we're now helping her with the job at home that it may pull her out of the workforce, but also we no longer have to wait for that nurse to get into a mental health crisis. We get her upstream when she's stressed with things like grocery delivery and home cleaning and can walk her to the mental health resources proactively before she is in a mental health crisis and going to click 12 times to an internet to go try and find that for herself.

Speaker 1: 21:35

Once somebody engages, once an employee engages with your platform, what's the frequency of their average engagement during the course of a year?

Speaker 3: 21:43

Yeah. So this is. It's all over the place. We have some people who come every day for months and months. We have some people who come once and then come back literally three years later because something has changed, have the opportunity to either manage their support plans online or they can print it and put it on mom's fridge if they call us in their call center. You know our employees are heterogeneous. They have heterogeneous needs. We have to meet them where they are, and so we see utilization trends sort of mirror that. But, as you might imagine, if you have a clinical condition, if you're going through a divorce, if you're closer to one of those life events where you're more at risk for leaving your job, being less productive in your job, we certainly see significantly higher engagement during those periods.

Speaker 1: 22:46

When you take on a new client, do you do an awful lot of employee engagement and employee education.

Speaker 3: 22:53

Yes, one of my bad dad jokes is that it's not like Field of Dreams If you build it, they do not come. And so the unique part of I think I told you this precision resource matching platform. It generates a bunch of data. We talked about how that can be used to reduce benefits spend or optimize investments. We also use that data specifically to drive engagement, and so, for example, if we have a client who has a high-cost issue with pregnancy, for example, we can cut the data and say what are employees most likely to come for.

Speaker 3: 23:36

As it turns out, the answer is dinner, because dinner with small children is a pain point. And so the creative doesn't say mom, you need a therapist, or mom, fill out those leave materials. Creative says a baby is a miracle. Sometimes so too, is a hot meal on the table. And so that targeted data-driven activation, coupled with just making it easier like you should be able to access benefits, like you bank online, call and get help in 200 languages, or do it on your mobile device means that we just get fundamentally more people in the front door.

Speaker 3: 24:12

But that is, if not you know, an important component of the program. It's arguably the most important part of the program and how we do that varies by client, but it goes the gamut from tools to allow managers to refer people who may have called out sick three times or been late three times, to signage in bathroom stalls in a manufacturing plant and magnets on their locker so that they can take it home and access it in their native language. And so the trifecta of the precision resource matching platform that generates data that then drives the activation. All three of those components are important and are generative, so they, as you might imagine, build over time. The more people we get in, the better the data we get, the more targeted the activation can be.

Speaker 1: 25:09

Sure, you mentioned early on that it's taken quite a number of years for you to get the algorithm and all of your systems to where they are. What do you see in the next five years?

Speaker 3: 25:21

So the reason it took us so long is because we literally were rounding at the point of care with nurses and then sending this product home with patients and seeing what fit and what did not.

Speaker 3: 25:37

As we go into the next five years, my goal is that this becomes standard of care, like I built this company because my best friend's father died of cancer and she went into preterm labor within 24 hours of her dad dying.

Speaker 3: 25:54

Two months ago, I lost a very close colleague when he suffered a brain bleed and passed away unexpectedly, and so he left behind two 15-year-old boys and a wife who's now trying to figure out what she does next. And so at the heart of what we do is to try and show up with support in those moments, and we have a very unique capability to do this, and so our goal is to get this to be standard of support. And so our goal is to get this to be standard of support, and so right now, we're focused on partnering with different types of employers retail manufacturing, food service, beverage companies to make sure that we are designing the intervention so that it can serve literally every type of employer, and then what you'll see us is try and take this to scale in 2025 and 2026 so that when your mom gets sick or your spouse is struggling, that in those moments there's a better way for them to connect to the things they need than there is today.

Speaker 1: 27:03

That's an awesome place to end our conversation for today, but we do hope you'll come back as the platform grows out and as you do more and more with more and more people. Ashley Reed, founder and CEO at Wellist. Ashley, thanks so much for sharing your expertise with our audience.

Speaker 3: 27:17

Thanks for having me, David.

Speaker 2: 27:19

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