health care

Healthcare benefits are great, but navigating them often isn’t. HealthJoy wants to make the experience more seamless for employees, while helping HR departments reduce the number of underutilized benefits. The Chicago-based company announced today it has raised $60 million in Series D funding, led by Valspring Capital with participation from Endeavor Vision and CIBC Innovation Banking. Returning investors U.S. Venture Partners, GoHealth founders Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones, Health Velocity Capital, Nueterra Capital and Epic also joined the round. ZebethMedia last covered HealthJoy when it raised its Series C. The latest funding brings its total raised to $108 million. Founder Justin Holland told ZebethMedia that HealthJoy’s client base has doubled to more than 1,000 employers, covering more than 500,000 employees and dependents, since its Series C funding. It integrates with every benefit in an employer’s package (including medical, dental, vision, savings accounts, clinics and wellness initiatives) and has a live 24/7 concierge. The platform expanded its virtual care suite to be more comprehensive, including a partnership with telemedicine provider Teladoc, which Holland says is an example of how HealthJoy is helping HR and brokers deal with additional major claim categories like cancer and cardiometabolic disease by making it easier for people to get preventative care. “Our belief is access has to be simple and seamless for employees to drive engagement,” he said. HealthJoy also introduced a new feature called “automated steerage” that guides members to lower cost and more efficient solutions in the app. In addition to Teladoc, it also has partnerships with services for medical and prescription claims, utilization management data and virtual care resolutions. “As we continue to invest in data partnerships, we’re building out a comprehensive member profile and engagement engine. That will enable us to engage members earlier and more often in the course of their healthcare journey,” Holland said. “Ideally, we are able to be more proactive than reactive to their personal needs.” HealthJoy sees a 60% activation rate after 30 days and 25% of its employee base logs into its app every month. “When we have the engagement, we use technology to drive utilization across all benefits. We know that members have healthcare needs, but they don’t always think about how their benefits programs can support these needs,” Holland says. An examplee of how HealthJoy helps them find these benefits include virtual assistant tech that automatically guides members to online options when they’re looking for the doctor. It also helps them compare costs for treatments and procedures when recommending providers and facilities, which Holland says saves members on average $2,000 in out-of-pocket costs. In a statement, Aneesha Mehta, co-founder of Valspring and a former partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said, “As users of healthcare technology ourselves, we genuinely identified with a core issue that HealthJoy fights: a serious lack of benefits awareness that leads to under-utilization by employees. Offering a solution that simplifies benefits is a key differentiator in the talent war the market currently finds itself in. We look forward to amplifying HealthJoy’s solutions as we’ve seen the value they bring firsthand.”