5 essential elements of digital healthcare ecosystems

As a benefits leader, your job isn’t just to offer great health benefits, it’s to ensure you offer employees benefits they actually need and will use. To truly serve your population, you need a robust, integrated digital healthcare ecosystem—one that’s built to evolve, while simplifying your employees’ experience and supporting them through their individual healthcare needs.

Here are five essential elements to building your organization’s own benefits ecosystem.

1. Relevant options for your employees

Offering benefits that employees actually use starts with understanding what matters to them. Your digital ecosystem platform, or point solution aggregator, can be the deciding factor in whether or not your benefit ecosystem is successful. With this in mind, you want to invest in a platform that aligns your offerings to usage patterns, population needs, and organizational goals.

Some questions to ask yourself: 

• Do we have internal resources allocated to support our point solution strategy? 
• Is our legal team on board to support procuring a new platform?
• Will the new platform support all of the vendors we currently use?
• Are all ecosystem partners integrated or do our employees need to access each one separately?
• Do we have clear data on use and engagement?
• Are we hearing frequent questions or complaints from employees about how to access benefits?
• If we don’t use a new platform, do we have an individual who can manage all of our vendors and engagement efforts effectively?

Castlight Health allows employers to deliver an integrated digital healthcare ecosystem that consolidates care navigation, point solutions, and health plan coverage into one seamless experience, reducing point solution fatigue and benefits sprawl. We can help you bring your benefit strategy to life more quickly. In fact, our health plan clients have told us that it can take them 18-24 months to onboard a new ecosystem benefit, but we remove this access barrier having already vetted the partner for security, scalability, and contracting. Our model allows clients to maintain a more flexible, dynamic benefit strategy where new vendors can quickly be added to reflect employee’s evolving needs.

With Castlight’s unified platform, your team can make informed decisions about what stays, what goes, and what matters most.

2. Easy, frictionless access

Even the best benefits won’t get used if they’re hard to find or difficult to understand. Castlight eliminates the friction with a single destination that supports access online, by app, or by phone. It makes it easy for employees to get benefits and healthcare support with just a call, click, or chat.

From claims and coverage explanations to provider searches and prescription support, members can access the care and information they need with zero guesswork, all in one place—no jumping between different platforms and logins!

3. Sustained member advocacy

Too often, employees are left to navigate complex healthcare decisions alone. Castlight provides members with ongoing patient support from Castlight Care Guides (real humans!) who walk members through care decisions, help schedule and referrals, and even manage transitions between providers. Getting fast, accurate, and personalized support from licensed professionals is easy and hassle-free.

This level of personalized advocacy isn’t just helpful. It drives better outcomes, reduces costs through preventive care, and builds trust in your benefits offerings. 
A recent internal study showed that Care Guides were linked to a 55.67% decrease in avoidable emergency department (ED) visits each month compared to baseline numbers. By guiding members to appropriate care resources, Care Guides reduce unnecessary ED visits and empower members to manage their health proactively.

4. Direct, personalized communication

Whether a member is actively taking a GLP-1 medication, wants to explore it, or is simply seeking helpIn a world of email and notification fatigue, it’s critical that the right benefits reach employees at the right time. Castlight is designed to connect meaningfully with its members by speaking directly to their unique concerns and needs. Castlight can also segment communication based on user behavior, health goals, and benefits eligibility to deliver timely, targeted nudges that actually drive members to engage in their healthcare.

Castlight also supports rewardable activities, incentivizing members to create healthier habits and seek preventive care. Our incentive programs are easily accessible within the Castlight app to drive better engagement with point solutions. Furthermore, clients are able to customize their incentive strategy to reflect their organization’s top priorities. 

Whether it’s encouraging preventive screenings, explaining new offerings, or supporting chronic condition management, Castlight ensures your people receive personalized communication when it matters and makes sense.

5. Scalability for what’s next

Benefits are never one-size-fits-all, and they’re never static. As your organization grows, your workforce shifts, or new solutions emerge, you need a platform that evolves with you. That’s where Castlight’s ecosystem comes in to help your ecosystem.

Our integrated digital partner ecosystem makes it easy to plug in new vendors, update benefits, and customize programs without starting from scratch. We are constantly expanding our Ecosystem to ensure our clients have access to the most relevant and impactful point solutions who are driving real outcomes and member satisfaction. We’ve recently added new partners, including Carrum, Lantern, Headspace, and Pelago, across high-cost categories such as Behavioral Health, Specialty Care, Substance Use and more. 

With Castlight in your corner, you can scale confidently and stay future-ready.

Ready to build an integrated digital healthcare ecosystem?

Request a demo today to see how Castlight can consolidate, integrate, and enhance your digital healthcare ecosystem that works to support a healthier, happier workforce.