Don't Just Check a Box: How to Build a Fertility Benefits Program That Drives Lasting Impact

When choosing a healthcare benefits provider, whether mental health, fertility, or primary care, it's important your vendor does more than check off a box. Employers should take a look under the hood to ensure quality of care, patient experience, as well as evidenced-based outcomes.  What you'll learn How to deliver equitable healthcare benefits access: a checklist The advantages and limits of virtual care and how to connect it with in-person care The role technology plays in the healthcare benefits ecosystem

Transcription:

Presenter (00:09):

Well everyone, thanks again for being here. It's been an awesome morning. Is everyone having a good time so far? Yeah. Did anybody have any churros? You there? Jesus, those were two. Good. I tried to stay away. Anyways, obviously I'm back up here and just going to lay the land a little bit for the rest of the afternoon before we get into what I think is going to be an awesome session here on a really wonderful topic. Just a few more general sessions. So there's two back to back. We'll have a little break and then a couple great whiteboarding sessions along the way as well. Okay? So stay tuned for those. But I'm just very, very excited about this topic specifically and I get to introduce two amazing people as well. So the topic is called Don't Just Check a Box, which I actually love the beginning of that. We've been talking about that all day, and we're going to continue down that trend, how to build a fertility program that drives lasting impact as well. So fortunately we have Haleigh Tebben, she's the Chief Revenue Officer at Kindbody and also Tanner Brunsdale, Senior Manager of Benefits and Mobility at Lyft. They're going to go over a wonderful case study and I'm just excited to hear from them. Hopefully you are as well. Thank you so much. Without further ado you, thank you so much.

Haleigh Tebben (01:28):

Hello everyone. We hope you're all in the right spot right after the churros and chocolate. I'm going to hit a little sugar high and hopefully we can keep that high going, but thank you so much for joining us again, Haleigh Tebben, Chief Commercial Officer at Kind Body and Tanner.

Tanner Brunsdale (01:43):

Yep, Tanner Brunsdale, Director of Benefits and Mobility. So recently Promoted from

Haleigh Tebben (01:52):

Deserved. So thank you so much for joining us. We know how complex the employee benefit space has become from the perspective of employee benefits leaders having all kinds of partners coming at them and all kinds of solutions they want to have you implement. We know how employees have a lot of demands. We've got a lot of different demographics in the workforce and a lot of unique needs from employees perspective. And so I think as you're an employee benefits leader and you're thinking through what to bring to bear to your employees, it's really important. I know this is near and dear to Tanner's heart. It's a great partner in the space of not just checking a box. You really need to think about the types of benefits you're offering, the types of partners that you're partnering with, and ensure that you're really digging in and ensuring that you've got partners that drive toward the best patient experience, the best clinical outcomes, high quality care, but even beyond all of that that you're delivering equitable care.

(02:49):

I think it's just so important and critical. I know it's important to Tanner and Lyft as well, that you're ensuring that you're delivering really equitable care. And we'll talk a little bit about today about how things like a hybrid care model can help support populations in places where they might not have access to care. We'll talk a little bit about what that patient experience needs to be like and how we support with a hybrid model. In addition, we'll spend a little bit of time talking about just holistic DEI views on benefits, and then we would be a bit remiss if we didn't talk about the impact of the political landscape right now on family building benefits and IVF. And so I know all of you probably have a cute little pink app on your phone that you used to navigate your way here last night. I know the lift line was very busy at the airport, but maybe Tanner, talk a bit about Lyft and maybe what we know and don't know about Lyft.

Tanner Brunsdale (03:40):

Yeah, so hopefully you're familiar with Lyft and you used our app to get here from the airport instead of those other guys. But in addition to being the second largest ride share operator in North America, we are also the largest bike and scooter share operator in the world. So city bike in New York City is kind of our biggest and most famous bike share model, but on our rideshare platform we do, we have about 500,000 drivers who do just over 13 million rides per week. So a lot of rides in terms of benefits eligible, full-time employees. We have about 3000 employees that are eligible for benefits through Lyft and they're 2000 of those here in the United States. We also have employees in Canada, Mexico, and over in Europe.

Haleigh Tebben (04:28):

Amazing. My children love the scooters. Whenever we go on vacation, we rent the scooters and ride around town. We have all kinds of charges for those scooters, but they're so fun.

(04:37):

So you probably all aren't as aware about Kind Body. So wanted to give a little bit perspective on who Kind Body is. So Kind Body was founded to really make reproductive care accessible for all, and we are focused on providing a comprehensive solution to support individuals through all life stages and however they want to form their family. And we are very unique in the fact that we are the only fertility benefits manager that actually is in the provision of care. So not only do we provide the ability for people to navigate to clinics they want to utilize, but we actually own and operate our own clinics. And so at the end of 2024, we'll have 38 clinics, signature clinics in the us. We also have over 400 partner clinics that we work with and over 3000 outside of the us. And so that's really, really important because we have clinicians obviously within our organization and we're able to provide higher quality outcomes and lower costs for enterprise clients like Lyft. We have 130 plus clients with over 2.7 million lives that we support. And because we are a direct contracting model and we're able to have a vertically integrated solution, we can deliver up to 30% savings for our clients. And I know that Tanner will talk a bit about how Lyft has achieved some of that in the fertility space.

(05:53):

In addition, because we have reproductive endocrinologists in all 50 states, we're able to support people wherever they live with a virtual first model where what we actually are seeing today that over 80% of our new patient visits are for the first initial consultation are virtual. And that's important because infertility, 80% of fertility clinics are in the top 10 metros. So there are literally wide swaths of this country where people cannot access care and they really obviously have a huge need as we know one in six families suffer from infertility or individuals suffer from infertility across the globe. And why is this really, really important? I know attainable will talk a little about the

Tanner Brunsdale (06:34):

Yeah, well no, I was just going to say if you're going to roll out a benefit, whatever benefit it is, whether it's fertility program or whatever, you have to make sure that your employees are able to actually access the benefit. So those employees that might live out of those big metro centers that might live in rural locations, like look at your telehealth benefits, are they robust? Are they high quality? And then if someone does need to travel for in-person care, think about maybe a travel benefit. So you're removing that financial burden for them actually being able to access the care.

Haleigh Tebben (07:06):

So true. And I think it's just evolved so much when you think about a decade ago when a lot of the digital health companies came on the market, I think a lot was around virtual care and maybe only virtual care or navigation, like we're going to help members get to the right place and it's become really complicated. And so we really think of a multimodal approach being critical. It was so obviously important for telehealth. Covid was in the fact that pre covid, I think 0.3% of encounters were via telemedicine 24% during covid. And those numbers have in some areas continued to be high and sustained. But I think what we've shown is that depending on the need, telemedicine is not enough. And so it is an important access point. As you said, Tanner, it's a way to get to appointment faster. It's removing barriers for cost, it's removing barriers from just geography, but it's important to couple it with the ability to have in-person access.

(08:00):

So look at Kind Body. We have the ability to have that virtual first appointment with your reproductive endocrinologist in the comfort of your home, go locally for labs or any kind of assessments that you need. And then when you're ready for the important points of retrievals transfers, you're able to then transfer or travel to a kind body clinic and we're able to bridge that gap. But that's not enough. Obviously. We know digital is important. We know wrapping everything around, people want to know what's going on all the time with their care. And we have a kind body EMR that we have across all of our locations. And then as much as we all love digital, we all love people too. We all love to be able to pick up the phone, especially in something as emotional as fertility care and ask questions. That's important for Lyft members to be able to reach out and talk to somebody,

Tanner Brunsdale (08:44):

To have someone to help them navigate them through this highly emotional journey in their lives for sure.

Haleigh Tebben (08:50):

So obviously very critical to have that approach and it really supports diversity, equity, inclusion. So Tanner, I know that Lyft has been a big advocate around the support for reproductive health and fertility implementing fertility in 2019. I'm sure it's not an easy thing to convince the CFO

Tanner Brunsdale (09:10):

Yep.

Haleigh Tebben (09:10):

Bring in a fertility benefit. So talk a little bit about your journey and how you've gotten here and you say to grow the program.

Tanner Brunsdale (09:16):

So at Lyft, we think of ourselves as a very high caring employer, and that's kind of our mantra is really focusing on what matters most to our team members and how we can make a really big impact in people's lives. We also deeply value diversity, equity, inclusion. It's a core within our product and the communities that we serve, but also core to our values as a company. So we initially did cover infertility as part of our medical plan, but we found it not to be super inclusive because you did need that underlying diagnosis of infertility in order for things to be covered. So you're missing out, you're not including LGBT folks or maybe single parents or maybe those that want to freeze their eggs if they want to start their family later. So in 2019, we did introduce a third party fertility program through Progeny, which was amazing, great utilization, but we did see costs kind of balloon year over year. That became a little unsustainable and our finance team didn't love that. So we were fortunate enough to be introduced to Kind Body and we were able to roll out a really holistic program through Kind Body in 2021 and also rolled out that program globally. So team members in every country that Lyft has, team members is able to access the benefit as well. So we launched the program there in July of 2021.

Haleigh Tebben (10:44):

Off cycle,

Tanner Brunsdale (10:45):

Off cycle. So I know we're all very busy always if we're on the calendar year cycle preparing for one one. So this is a great benefit to do midyear, like I mentioned, we did have prior fertility coverage eligibility for the program is team members and spouses and their partners enrolled in our self-funded medical plan. And then like I mentioned, we do also extend that to global team members. It's great to have this kind of benefit included within your medical plan because deductibles, copays out, OFP pocket maximum, those things all do apply to the benefit and then all the claims just run through all of your medical claims. Our program does cover four kind cycles and kind cycles would be like I-V-F-I-U-I, cryo preservation. All the fertility medications are managed through Kind Body and then each cycle also includes two years of tissue storage. A very important component of any family forming benefits program is access to third party services, so third party reimbursement for adoption, surrogacy, egg donation, sperm donation, any kind of donor services.

(11:56):

If you really want to roll out an inclusive benefit, you have to think about this and making sure that that benefit is somewhat on par to the kind of fertility benefits. When I first joined Lyft, the lifetime maximum for third party services was $10,000. And so that was something I was able to increase to 40 because when you think about four cycles potentially of IVF, it's going to be a lot more than $10,000. So I wanted to make sure that those going through that third party route had an equitable benefit. And then we do offer that $5,000 lifetime for medical tourism for those that do need to travel to access care. And then I actually do have a, that's a photo of myself and my husband and our daughter, Olivia that we adopted last year. So I have a personal journey and a personal experience with using family forming benefits.

(12:49):

So kind of our story, my husband and I, we met 15 years ago and always knew from the get go we wanted to become parents, but as a same-sex couple, it takes a little more than hopes and dreams to start a family. So it wasn't until I did have access to these family forming benefits that I was able to work with a care navigator that kind of helped me through the entire adoption process, helped me find a adoption agency and then also supported the journey financially, which these things are pretty expensive. So last year my husband and I, we got a call that two days before our daughter was born and birth mother at the hospital made an adoption plan and chose us as the birth parents. So literally our lives changed overnight and I don't know if it would've been possible without family forming benefits like these

Haleigh Tebben (13:44):

Beautiful Olivia.

Tanner Brunsdale (13:45):

Yes, Olivia. So just a little bit about the program and kind of the results we've seen with Kind Body over the last three years. We have very high utilization and I'm told this is not super, not normal, normal, but our average age is 34 and we have a very engaged workforce. So we've seen about 11.6% utilization over the last three years. You can see there the clinic distribution, so the kind body signature clinics are amazing. Haley talked about, they're kind of like a spa-like experience. You would never guess you're at a doctor's office. So those are amazing. But it is great to have access to kind body's partner network where employees do have that choice if they would want to go to a partner clinic. My favorite number on the screen is that 33 Families Forum, so literally 33 lives changed through the program. I think the best part of my job, and I'm sure a lot of you can agree is Benefit Professionals is getting that call or being sent a photo of someone's new child and just saying like, Hey, the benefits and the support you provided through Lyft is why I was able to make my dream of becoming a parent.

(15:00):

True. So just love seeing that. We get great feedback on the program. So 82 NPS score, which is amazing. One of our most loved benefits at Lyft, the cost savings. So our finance team really loves to see this slide. We've seen about $2.4 million in savings over what we may have otherwise spent without utilizing Kind Body and their network. And then the utilization breakdown, so you can kind of see how our team members are utilizing the program from those pharmacy benefits assessments, cryo-preservation, gynecology, and then Holistic health that would be like that adoption care navigator that I worked with.

Haleigh Tebben (15:41):

Yeah, it is amazing to see the engagement of the lift population. I've been in this space for a long time. I think it's always hard to navigate how to communicate benefits

(15:50):

because I think there's just so much out there. So kudos to you all for what you've done. Very impressive. Tanner, you've talked a little bit about just how important it is at Lyft to support the broad spectrum of team members you have and employees that you have and done a great job obviously, but I know you've got a very diverse workforce. How are you thinking about the future? What is next and where are you headed next?

Tanner Brunsdale (16:16):

Yeah, so before, I think everyone here should do an evaluation of your benefit partners and your benefit plans before you start even thinking about the future and making sure that all the benefits you offer truly are inclusive. So here on the slide is a few different demographics to look at, just make sure that a range of ages are supported conditions, gender identities, heterosexual, same sex couples, singles, parents, that everyone really feels included in that benefit as well as geographically distributed, like we said, is everyone able to physically access the benefit for Lyft? I think the next step of the things that we're thinking about is supporting employees from their full life cycle. So starting with making sure team members have access to high quality preventive care and high quality prenatal care. And even those employees that might not need fertility assistance, how are we supporting them through a healthy pregnancy? Maternity spend is our number one claims driver at Lyft, so we're always looking at ways to how we can support employees to making sure they're getting the best care as possible. And then also looking at things like doula support. Is that something that we could look at? And then once Baby is here, how can we as an employer support new parents?

(17:36):

We all know as parents there are a lot of challenges, especially as a working parent, so how can we ease that burden for new parents and then all the way to menopause support. I know it's a hot topic right now, but something that we're thinking about how can we support women who are going on that journey as well?

Haleigh Tebben (17:55):

Yeah, menopause is hot as they say right now.

Tanner Brunsdale (17:57):

It's hot. Yeah, it's

Haleigh Tebben (17:58):

A new tagline I hear about all the time Menopause is hot and it doesn't get easier. Right now I've got a teenager and I don't sleep again, but it's for different reasons when I didn't sleep when we had the newborn. Right. Yeah, it's great to see where you all are headed, Tanner, and the fact that you're thinking about your populations holistically.

(18:16):

I think for us at Kind Body, we also are thinking about how we support our partner clients like Tanner and Lyft, just to ensure that we're also thinking holistically about that journey and not just even about all of the stages and phases of reproductive health, but also the holistic support. So you think about what Tanner talked about with just the support of adoption coach, adoption navigator. I think going through a fertility journey and the type of maybe nutrition counseling you need or maybe the therapy you need or maybe unfortunately you suffer a loss. So really thinking holistically. And so we think about life stages and support as well, starting all the way from learners. And I think for me, what's been interesting in this space lately is making sure you're thinking about whatever that family building journey might look for you and your populations early on. But I think historically we've talked about infertility as a female issue and we all know that there are female males involved and that half of the infertility issues are derived from the male side of things. And we historically in the fertility industry, I don't think have spent as much time. And so kind man has allowed us to really ensure that we're supporting those employers and those members to understand that we want to make sure we assess that early on so we aren't using dollars and resources and time not going to the right issue.

Tanner Brunsdale (19:33):

Yeah, I mean I love the kind man piece because like you said, traditionally you're all, you focus on women, but obviously it takes two to tango, so like you said, 50% is due to the mail. So I love that that is something that you're focusing on

Haleigh Tebben (19:47):

Another important topic right now.

Tanner Brunsdale (19:49):

Yeah.

Haleigh Tebben (19:49):

Then obviously preserving, it's been great to see just, there was a lot of stigma I think around egg freezing, et cetera in the past, but I think just seeing how much people are talking about these things earlier in their lives, we know age is the biggest issue and infertility, and so to see the focus and the support employers like Lyft are providing and viewing that, okay, if I'm in the health plan, I'm not getting that, but preventative cryopreservation, so let's think about ways to support. And so a lot of times Energy right now is focused on how do we support those preservers, both from obviously people that want to be proactive but also people that are dealing with health issues that maybe it's really important for them with a cancer diagnosis or other need to preserve their fertility. Obviously a lot of what we do is around family building, be it fertility treatments, I-V-F-I-U-I, time dinner course adoption, surrogacy donor coaching and foster care support, however people want and need to form their families and all of the support around that.

(20:45):

And then as Tanner mentioned a lot right now we've developed kind doula and kind baby. Another issue is lots of parts of the country, there's no access to doulas and maternal health is a major issue in this country. So we have a virtual first doula program where we're able to provide doula support during and postpartum for expecting parents and new moms to ensure that we're supporting the health of their pregnancy and their birth plan. And then obviously new parents is a big part of a lot of what we do because there is so much that happens when you're bringing that new baby home, lactation support, postpartum sleep coaching, nutrition, all of the mental health that goes into that. Also Kind Body has done a lot of work to develop solutions to support Return to Work. We are seeing a lot of interest from employers around getting people the support they need to come back into the office. That's a big transition period.

Tanner Brunsdale (21:35):

Yeah, it's huge. And Return to Work support has been something that we've been focused on as well for next year.

Haleigh Tebben (21:42):

So we've developed a new return to work program where it actually helps people provide, they have a coach that walks them through their 30, 60, 90 day plan depending on how long their leave is to get back into the office and then to continue to support them while they're back into the office. And then the big topic, menopause. I think that's one area where again, it's great to see the conversations happening at Kind Body. We've developed a menopause program that is OB, GYN led, so starting with truly helping individuals understand what's going on with their hormones if appropriate, we can prescribe HRT, but a lot of times we see there's a lot of underlying symptoms. So really supporting, again, nutrition counseling or therapy or just other things that people might be going through. So really trying to support the gamut and it's excited to see where Lyft is headed next.

Tanner Brunsdale (22:29):

And I mean all of these things, there's so much out there on the internet and you can get lost for hours searching things on the own. It's so nice to be able to have one source to go to have an expert to speak to. Speaking of my adoption journey, just having that person to go to when I had questions, when I needed support, when I needed to know what's next and if the agency told me something and I was like, well, does this sound right? So being able to have that place to go for support, whatever your family forming journey is or wherever you are, it's just been amazing to have a partner kind body to do that.

Haleigh Tebben (23:01):

A great partner for us. Thank you. Dr. Google is what I tend a rabbit hole there a lot. So I think we'd be remiss again if we didn't talk about, there's just a lot of uncertainty going on right now in obviously the US with the political environment and Alabama is where this all started. And so us at Kind Body, we just want to talk a little about how do you support your employees when there's just a lot of unknowns out there. So when Alabama happened, we had a lot of members obviously that were wondering what to do. And so immediately we reached out to each member that we knew had tissue in Alabama or resided in Alabama to help them create a plan as to what we could do to support them and then quickly made sure we were supporting our clients. I think you probably got a ton of questions

Tanner Brunsdale (23:42):

And it seems, I don't know if others, but when something big happens like that, it feels like a lot of vendors are very reactive and employees are asking you questions and you can't get anything out of the vendor, but Kind Body was so proactive when this came down, they already had talking points, they already had what they're doing as a company and what you can do as an employer already ready. They were already reaching out to folks. So

Haleigh Tebben (24:04):

Yeah, I think the most important thing, you're already doing a lot of this Tanner Lift, but when these things are happening, how do you make sure you're providing a comprehensive program that can support your employees? So they do have the ability to access the care they need, stay informed, they're going to ask you questions.

Tanner Brunsdale (24:18):

Yeah, I mean it's something that we looked at last year when a lot of reproductive rights were being restricted in certain areas. And again, it goes back to providing that travel benefit. It is low utilize and low cost, but just having that there if people do need to travel more than a hundred miles to see and in network provider. So having that in place does relieve a lot of that tension as laws are changing and things are uncertain.

Haleigh Tebben (24:45):

So we want to make sure that we help support. I think travel benefit's important, I think prepared to act swiftly. A lot of things happen with Alabama very quickly where people were in the middle of cycling or they weren't sure what to do. And so just to make sure there're to help support. And I think advocating for this at Kind Body, we launched a campaign, I'm not sure if any of you saw it last week called Open the Doors and it's really around opening the doors for family building and reproductive rights and just trying to get people to understand how important this is. Right now the Skim is partnering with us and we're actually doing a survey right now that all of you can go out and take, we'd encourage you to or to sign up for. And we had 1500 responses in the last week of people that have responded to this survey. And what we're seeing no surprise is how important this benefit is to people. So we're seeing people tell us, a majority of them, they would move states, they would switch jobs to have access to family building and IVF benefits. And so it's obviously just a very important and bipartisan situation because anybody wants to be able to build a family in this country. So we would encourage you all to go out and take the survey and join us in it. I think with that we have a few minutes for questions if anybody has any

Audience Member 1 (26:04):

So what do you attribute your savings to? How are you getting savings from this program?

Haleigh Tebben (26:10):

Do you want me to answer?

Tanner Brunsdale (26:11):

Yeah, I'll let get that.

Haleigh Tebben (26:12):

I think there's a few ways. So obviously from a lift perspective, they are comparing what their costs would be if they weren't working with Kind Body versus are working with Kind Body. So like a baseline. And we see a couple areas of savings when partnering with Kind Body. One is because we own our own clinics and you're able to have a direct contract and we're vertically integrated, there's a lot of savings that you can drive from that. We have value, value-based case rates that are bundled. We also save a lot of money on the pharmacy side. So I dunno how much you know about IVF, but there's a lot of cost in IVF in pharmacy. And so two ways we save on pharmacy, one is we have a specialty pharmacy that we work with. We've got amazing competitive pricing, but also we reduce a lot of waste.

(26:57):

So in fertility, a lot of times you are having a week worth of medication shipped or many, much more than you need. We're doing same day and next day medication shipments at tighter volumes and tighter amounts. So we're saving, I saw one the other day, 47% on pharmacy and we evaluated what we did now versus what they were doing because what do you do with those extra drugs? They cost a lot of money. There's actually black markets where people are selling them because they've got all these fertility prescriptions, they dunno what to do with. So it's a combination of direct contract value-based rates and pharmacy savings through waste and just reduced rates.

Tanner Brunsdale (27:33):

And I think Kind Body is the only provider that actually owns their own clinics and pharmacy. So you you're getting rid of that kind of middle

Haleigh Tebben (27:39):

Man.

(27:40):

Yeah, I mean the world I think is going to that, right? The center of excellence and the direct contracting model because there's not a lot of places where you can save money right now. But I thought you said that we don't have to use the clinic. You don't have to. No. We have partner clinics too. So we have, you saw on Lyfts, I think 66% or 68% use signature clinics with our partner clinics. We do have negotiated rates. We don't have as much savings that we're driving at the partner clinics, but we do pass along our competitive rates that we have negotiated with them with. So it's kind of an overall view. So you've got the partner clinics where you aren't saving as much the signature clinics, you are saving a lot more, but you have pharmacy across both of those. So we're doing the pharmacy work across both,

Tanner Brunsdale (28:21):

Which I think is an option. You could turn off the partner clinics if you wanted to realize more direct savings, but we've chosen to kind of expand to their partner network as well, just so there's more options, more choice.

Haleigh Tebben (28:34):

Walmart is a client of ours and they talked about this publicly. They have a center of excellence model, so they only use our signature clinics and they actually save more money by having the travel benefit and using the signature clinic than if they would do a broader network.

Audience Member 1 (28:49):

So I'm sorry, I don't mean to hog this, but this is a follow up actually to the Lyft gentleman. I can't remember your first name, but is that what you saw moving from Progeny? Because you said you had to stop that benefit. It was so expensive.

Tanner Brunsdale (29:04):

We did. Yeah. Those are the direct savings of switching from, because

Audience Member 1 (29:08):

I thought Progeny also makes you use their network of providers and they do bundling. So I'm trying to figure out the difference here.

Haleigh Tebben (29:16):

I think they're different models. Yeah, they're different models. One is we're delivering care so we're able to drive savings in our care delivery process versus the other is more of a spread pricing model, different models,

Audience Member 2 (29:32):

Great conversation. Can you steelman the argument of some companies who might want to do a fertility or family planning benefit through an HRA rather than through contracting directly with a point solution? Why would someone do an HRA rather than,

Tanner Brunsdale (29:51):

So just like a direct reimbursement instead of running through a medical plan. I guess one way is it can be a little bit more inclusive saying, Hey, we will give you $40,000 no matter what you spend on fertility benefits and you can use that for adoption, surrogacy, whatever you want. It's $40,000, here you go. But you're not seeing those savings by working directly with a kind body, working through the clinic and folks aren't able to access usually a lot of the care they'll run out of that lifetime maximum pretty quick. So I think partnering with, yeah,

Haleigh Tebben (30:22):

That's a big benefit, right, is because if you're letting people go wherever they want, it creates great choice and great flexibility, but then they're not able to benefit from savings that's been negotiated by your benefit manager or your partner, right? Because you've negotiated savings. You're also, there's a lot of clinics out there that are high cost, which is great, but they might not be the best quality. I think people go there because of the name. So I think helping curate a network where you've got good costs as low cost with high quality and kind of making sure we curate that and direct people there helps our dollars go further, helps 'em get better outcome. Yep.

Presenter (30:59):

Any question? Sure. Front row.

Audience Member 3 (31:04):

So for Haley, the ideal client, what does that look like? And for Tanner, just curious about Tanner, well, is he the standard client, but for Tanner, I'm just curious about the communications and how this was rolled out and what you did TOIs.

Tanner Brunsdale (31:25):

Yeah, I can start. I mean I'm super fortunate that our workforce is super engaged. We're a very Slack heavy organization and for those of you that use Slack, that's good and bad. But we do kind of post announcements. We have our own benefits Slack channel that gets a lot of traction. We don't answer questions there. We force people to go through our Zendesk program because that would take a lot of time. It's only post only, but we do have highly engaged employees that when we do post something on Slack, when we do send an email, people are interested. I think I mentioned our average age is 34, so a lot of folks are at that time when they're thinking about growing their families. So that's another reason why we're seeing a lot of utilization in the program.

Haleigh Tebben (32:07):

Yeah, I would say from our perspective, ideally we would like to have employers with over a thousand employees just because the utilization of the benefit is obviously not everybody utilizes it. And so you want to have enough volume so you can justify setting up a client, that kind of thing. I would say at Kind Body we've started partnering with a number of navigation and other vendors which allow us to go to lower life counts because contracting through a Quantum or an accolade. So I think then we don't have as many restrictions on size, but ideally a thousand or more lives. Thank you

Presenter (32:39):

All. Any other questions?

Haleigh Tebben (32:40):

Yeah, I thank you Tanner for joining and thank you for all that you do in partnership with us. We really, really,

Tanner Brunsdale (32:46):

Yeah. And I'll say anyone that's thinking about a benefit like this and you're having questions or second thoughts, like I'm available. Literally one of the best benefits you can offer. So

Presenter (32:55):

Everybody give it up for Tanner and Hailey. Thank you.