Visibility
Understand where employee demand may be developing and identify potential gaps in the current benefits experience.
Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare: Navigating the New Front Door to Care
As healthcare choices evolve, employers can help employees access trusted options while addressing cost, quality and gaps in traditional benefits.
Direct-to-consumer healthcare is changing how employees find, access, and pay for health products and services, often outside traditional employer-sponsored benefit channels.
For employers, this shift raises important questions around cost, access, quality, compliance, and the overall employee experience. It also creates an opportunity to understand where these emerging healthcare choices can enhance and complement a broader benefits strategy.
What Is Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare?
Direct-to-consumer healthcare gives people ways to access certain health products and services directly, rather than relying solely on traditional employer-sponsored health plan pathways. These options reflect growing demand for greater affordability, convenience, personalization, and access.
The direct-to-consumer landscape spans a broad and evolving range of options, including virtual primary and specialty care, prescription access, diagnostics and preventative health, condition-specific programs, and wellness services.
As more employees make healthcare decisions outside traditional benefits channels, employers have an opportunity to consider how those choices connect with the benefits and support they already provide.
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How Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare Is Changing Employee Choices
Healthcare access and purchasing behaviors continue to evolve. Rising healthcare costs, changing consumer expectations, increased direct-to-consumer marketing, expanded virtual-care options, and growing demand for more transparent and convenient ways to access care are influencing how individuals engage with healthcare. Employees can now explore and purchase a growing range of health products and services directly, often prioritizing cost, access, personalization, and convenience.
For employers, those choices can create both opportunity and complexity. When care happens outside traditional benefit channels, organizations may have less visibility into what employees use, what they spend, and how those choices connect with existing benefits.
Direct-to-consumer healthcare is becoming part of the benefits conversation. The question for employers is how intentionally they want to respond.
What Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare Means for Employers
As employees increasingly explore healthcare outside traditional benefit channels, employers need to consider the implications for their workforce and existing benefits ecosystem. Direct-to-consumer healthcare is part of a broader human capital conversation, as employers look for new ways to make access to care available, respond to changing workforce expectations and support the overall employee value proposition without fundamentally redesigning existing benefits programs.
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Cost and affordability
Consider where benefits could reduce affordability barriers that may compel employees to seek care outside the health plan.
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Access and inclusion
Consider how direct-to-consumer options could help address unmet needs across different segments of the workforce, including populations that may have limited access through traditional benefit programs.
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Quality and trust
Explore resources that help navigate a rapidly expanding market where the quality and clinical value of available options may vary.
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Compliance and governance
Determine where the organization should encourage, integrate, or establish appropriate boundaries around direct-to-consumer options.
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Employee experience
Make it easier for employees to understand their options without creating a disconnected or overwhelming benefits experience.
Questions Benefits Leaders Should Ask About Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare
- What direct-to-consumer health products and services are our employees already using?
- What direct-to-consumer channels exist in our benefits ecosystem today, for example through health plans or benefits administrators, and do they support our benefits philosophy?
- Where could direct-to-consumer options improve access, affordability, or personalization?
- Where could they meaningfully fill gaps without adding unnecessary cost or complexity?
- How should direct-to-consumer behavior inform our broader benefits strategy?
Bringing Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare Into Your Benefits Strategy
As direct-to-consumer healthcare continues to grow, employers have an opportunity to take a more intentional role in how these options fit within their benefits strategy.
A more deliberate approach can help organizations:
- Provide employees with clearer, more trusted paths to care
- Expand access to affordable healthcare options
- Reduce the burden of navigating a growing number of healthcare solutions
- Better understand employee needs and emerging utilization patterns
- Bring greater confidence to vendor and clinical quality decisions
- Connect healthcare choices to the broader benefits strategy
How Aon Is Responding to Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare
A New Approach with Access Choice
Access Choice is Aon’s approach to helping employers connect employees with a suite of direct-to-consumer healthcare options through a simpler, more trusted experience. It is being developed to complement an employer’s existing health and benefits programs by creating a more connected path to selected options that may be available outside traditional health plan channels.
By creating greater alignment between the direct-to-consumer market and the employer benefits ecosystem, Access Choice is designed to help organizations expand access, address affordability and evolving employee needs, and make more informed decisions about where these options fit within their broader benefits strategy.
For employees, the vision is a simpler, more trusted way for exploring healthcare options and navigating choices based on their individual and household needs.
Aon Access Choice is being developed, with ongoing efforts focused on enhancing the solution experience, expanding solution categories and participating vendors, advancing analytics capabilities, aligning funding and compliance pathways, and refining the commercial strategy.
Where Healthcare Choice Meets Benefits Strategy
Direct-to-consumer healthcare should not be considered in isolation. The choices employees make outside the traditional plan may offer insights about affordability, unmet needs, access, and the benefits experience they expect.
By bringing together market insight, benefits strategy, data, and employee engagement, employers can make more informed decisions about how the direct-to-consumer healthcare market can coexist with their broader strategy and how it can support workforce and business priorities.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Why does direct-to-consumer healthcare matter to employers?
Employees' use of options outside traditional benefits channels can raise considerations around cost, quality, compliance, visibility, and employee experience.
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How can direct-to-consumer healthcare fit into a benefits strategy?
Employers can leverage broader direct-to-consumer healthcare trends when evaluating their overall benefits strategy, including how employee needs, expectations, and access to care may be evolving.
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What should employers evaluate when considering direct-to-consumer healthcare options?
Employers may consider how developments in the direct-to-consumer healthcare market could affect employee expectations and the broader benefits landscape. Relevant considerations may include general market trends, affordability, access, clinical quality, employee experience, and alignment with the employer’s overall benefits philosophy.
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How can employers account for direct-to-consumer healthcare in their broader benefits strategy?
Employers can consider how direct-to-consumer trends and options align with existing benefits, navigation, and employee communications.
