Benefits member experience is broken. We launched the Nava Benefits App to fix it.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos

In 2013, I found myself in a precarious position: living in the corner of a friend's one-bedroom apartment while recovering from cancer surgery. Amidst the chaos of being a patient and the fog of pain killers, I failed to stay on top of the incoming medical bills, resulting in over $30,000 of medical debt going into collections.

Unfortunately, my story is far from unique — nearly half of all Americans have medical debt, and 25% have medical debt in collections.

Determined to change this narrative, my co-founders and I started Nava, an innovative benefits brokerage on a mission to make healthcare affordable and accessible to everyone, starting with the 49% of Americans who get their health insurance through their employer.

There’s no use in offering high-quality, affordable healthcare if employees don’t know how to use it.

Nearly half of all Americans don’t understand the employee benefits available to them. This is understandable. Employee benefits are so complicated that even the most experienced HR professionals rely on their benefits broker to make sense of their plan.

But for Nava, this meant that transforming healthcare would first require making benefits easier to understand for employees and their families — what the industry refers to as “member experience”.

In our research, we learned that every company, larger or small, struggles with the same issues when it comes to member experience:

1. Employees don't remember what benefits they have.
2. Employees don't know how to access and utilize their benefits.
3. Employees don't know where to turn for help when they have questions.

Many digital health innovators have built products to address these issues, but the core problems persist. That’s because delivering exceptional member experience is a complex (and expensive) task. Consequently, those products have been primarily limited to large companies with thousands of employees, leaving the millions of Americans employed at smaller employers without a solution.

That’s why we built the Nava Benefits App, a whole new approach to member experience.

The Nava Benefits App provides small and mid sized companies with a modern member experience solution for their employee benefits. We’re out to solve the core problems that employees face, so they can make the most of their benefits, get easy access to care, and get expert assistance when they need it. And we’re offering it to all Nava clients at no cost.

The Nava Benefits app is now available to all Nava clients and their employees, for free.

The app provides users with an overview of their employee benefits, enabling easy access to all essential plan details and carrier information. In an effort to reduce hassle for employees (and HR teams), we’re automatically generating member ID cards inside of the app weeks before they arrive in the mail.

But our investment in member support doesn’t begin and end with the digital experience. We also invested in a dedicated benefits support team, made up of industry experts with the benefits know-how to solve any problem employees may face. When employees run into problems, they message our team of Benefits Advocates for issues ranging from submitting claims to contesting surprise medical bills. This team is staffed by full-time Nava employees, based in the United States, with years of benefits experience.

Although we are enthusiastic about our current features, we have only scratched the surface. Our roadmap promises to further enhance the Nava Benefits App's capabilities for employees, an essential step in achieving our mission of high-quality and affordable healthcare for every American.

If you would like a demo or have feature suggestions, I would love to hear from you. You can contact me any time at donald@navabenefits.com.

Want to revamp your benefits member experience — and help your employees get the full value of their benefits? Learn more and get a demo of the Nava Benefits App.