When it comes to benefits, employers often look for two things: new ways to keep up with rising healthcare costs and more flexibility in how they offer benefits.
To meet these expectations, Providence Health Plan is calibrating its offerings for self-funded employer clients, CEO Don Antonucci told Becker’s.
The Portland, Ore.-based health plan is launching a platform with Collective Health, slated for 2026. The third-party administrator combines employee benefit offerings into one platform while providing analytics and insights to employers.
The partnership with Collective Health allows Providence Health Plan to combine its strengths as a regional health plan with a more advanced technological platform, Mr. Antonucci said.
“When you combine that with what Providence Health Plan does uniquely well — not only the relationship with our own delivery system at Providence, and partners outside of Providence — those regional relationships, and the ability to serve employers in a much more flexible manner was really appealing,” he said.
Employers have always paid more for care than Medicaid or Medicare, Mr. Antonucci said. With these programs under increasing strain, employers are picking up more of the cost of care.
As costs rise, employers are asking for direct relationships with providers.
“That is now going to be even further exaggerated because of the pressures in the other marketplaces,” Mr. Antonucci said. “To me, it means we’re going to hear the continued drumbeat of employers wanting these relationships, because they can’t afford to provide care to their employees at some point.
Providence Health Plan is already well positioned to have conversations with Providence and other health systems that other payers can’t, Mr. Antonucci said.
“Collective Health provides something that we can’t do, which is hyperflexibility,” he said. “If there’s a certain network configuration that we want to put in place that really makes sense for an employer and provider, we can do that much more easily now than what it would take for us to be able to invest in our systems or processes to make that happen.”
Launched in 2013, Collective Health has typically worked directly with employers, co-founder and CEO Ali Diab told Becker’s. The partnership with Providence Health Plan could help open the door for the company to expand beyond the self-funded market, Mr. Diab said.
“I do expect us, over time, to disrupt not just the self-insured employer market pretty significantly, but the small-group fully insured, individual fully insured and potentially beyond, ” he said.
Mr. Antonucci hopes to see significant growth in the self-funded market for Providence Health Plan as a result of the partnership, he said. The health plan is primarily in Oregon, but sees significant expansion opportunities in Washington state.
“Right now, bread and butter for us is Oregon, continuing to serve our clients and growing. Washington is continuing to build on the growth we’ve started there. This is really going to power this for us,” he said.
