Disrupting Employee Health Benefits - Lauren Randall - Episode #49

At age 19, Lauren Randall was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Her doctor told her she would be on medications for the rest of her life. Refusing to accept the life sentence, Lauren became the CEO of her own healthcare. She researched all the information she could and made radical lifestyle changes. After six months, the disease had disappeared. 

Lauren’s experience drove her to a career in employee health benefits, where she consults with CFOs and CHROs on their people and risk strategies to get the best care and rates possible. She does this while meeting cutting-edge needs such as addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace and providing value and mission-aligned benefits to attract and keep top talent. 

Key takeaways 

• Over 50% of Americans have a chronic illness. The whole concept of insurance is that the many will take care of the few, and that starts to erode if all of us are carrying chronic conditions. That is one reason we struggle to maintain healthcare costs. 

• The insurance industry has changed over the past 30 years. The Affordable Care Act added layers of compliance and penalties that changed the landscape for employers and insurance brokers. It created a need for analytics that wasn’t necessary before. 

• Technology can serve the health benefits industry in several ways. It helps estimate costs and identify quality service providers. It can help measure the impact of the benefits plan and give employers and brokers insight into how to support employees in better health and productivity. It can also help employers and brokers identify benefits that attract and keep the specific demographic of talent they need the most. 

• For example, attracting highly qualified women into a predominately male industry may include offering things like rich fertility benefits, childcare benefits, and equal paternity leave. 

• Productivity during the pandemic was higher for employers with employees who aligned with the mission and vision of the organization. 

• The mission and vision, and culture of your organization can drive lifestyle outcomes, maybe more than a wellness program, but they’re all tied together. Creating a culture around taking care of people can go a long way toward improving productivity, reducing stress, and decreasing burnout. 

• You may not be a doctor. You may not have an M.D., but you are the only one who can make decisions about your own health. If one in three knee surgeries are unnecessary, are you getting a second opinion? There are programs we can implement with employers to allow employees to get world-class, peer-reviewed second opinions. 

• You must be CEO of your own health because nobody else has the same skin in the game.
   

Quote from the show: 

8:56 “20% of America’s GDP is healthcare. It’s this big sort of behemoth that encapsulates everything from private equity to hospitals and providers to our government. Everybody, including brokers, has their hand in the pot of this profit center. And that creates a lot of inefficiencies and waste...” 
 

Links: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenrandall1/  

Company Website: https://www.marshmma.com/us/home.html 

Women to Women Exchange: https://www.womentowomenexchange.com/ 
 

Ways to Tune In: 

Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption 

Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755 

Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZGlzcnVwdGlvbmludGVycnVwdGlvbi5jb20vZmVlZC54bWw 

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD 

Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/disruption-interruption 

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf2zbLqmHtSHQ7u1V-Is8cA