Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthSherpa CTO Ning Liang (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said Google search. Are people doing Google searches and you are catching them at the point of search, or is there some other way that you are going to market?

Ning Liang: That’s correct. Google search is one component of our go-to-market strategy. We also partner with companies whose audience may overlap with this segment that I mentioned, or audience that may not have health insurance through an employer.

An example is a large retail chain that may not offer health insurance to part-timers. That is a very common one. We also cater to companies that offer tools to freelancers and self-employed individuals to manage the taxes. We have a partnership with Intuit and QuickBooks that utilize a lot of self-employed people.

We also have a pretty broad network of insurance agents that work with us. A lot of times, the insurance agents in their local community are looked at as a source for many types of insurance. So when you go to your local insurance, you may be going for auto or home insurance, but you may also be in the right segment for health insurance that you don’t have with your employer. That’s why we partner with insurance agents – to refer those consumers to us.

They actually use a branded tool that we offer to insurance agents. It provides a lot of the education and decision support, in other words, helping consumers get insurance for the first time, navigate how much savings they get, how to choose a health plan, and get them enrolled. Those are the three ways that we do it. We’ve got a few others as well but those are the three most common ways. 

Sramana Mitra: And how do you make money? 

Ning Liang: Good question. So on a subset of the heath plan, we contract with the insurance company to receive a commission. It is important to note that we don’t let that affect our user experience. When you are shopping and you are looking at plans, we don’t bias-sort based on commissions or support. Our recommendation engine doesn’t have that as a factor. We only monetize something like 60% of the enrollment on our site.

Sramana Mitra: Help me understand one thing which is confusing me. Obamacare is a government program, right?

Ning Liang: Yes, that’s a great question. The Obamacare or the ACA offers you subsidies that you can use to buy health insurance from private health companies or health insurance companies.

So something concrete is that there might be an Ambetter plan and it costs $600 a month per household. The government might reimburse $550 based on your income. But this could be very challenging for people, especially in the lower-income range that may be living paycheck to paycheck.

Instead the government directly pays Ambetter the $550 and you only have to pay the $50 each month. 

Sramana Mitra: Okay, got it. 

Ning Liang: I think it’s part of our value proposition that we a have direct connection to the government backend. So we sit on the same API and only a small number of companies have this because you have to go through a lot of requirements from the government in terms of security and business logic requirements to be able to connect to them.

We are actually the first company in the country that gets this connection. The whole point of it is that when you come to our site and you’re filling in your actual application, we are making API calls to the federal government system. 

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Interesting !

Ning Liang: Instead of that monthly payment, when you are done, you just have to pay the net cost. There is no extra round about reimbursement. You just pay the net cost. It is sent to the insurance company instantly at the end of our process and it is seamless. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: HealthSherpa CTO Ning Liang
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