Reimagining Primary Care Through Collaboration

Reimagining Primary Care Through Collaboration
March 23, 2026 10 mins

Reimagining Primary Care Through Collaboration

Reimagining Primary Care for the Future of Employer Health

Aon Accelerate Lab insights on strengthening primary care as the coordinating hub of employer healthcare to improve access, outcomes and employee experience.

Table of Contents

  1. Primary Care Is the Most Underutilized Lever in Employer Healthcare

  2. Inside the Aon Accelerate Lab on Primary Care

  3. Seeing Primary Care Through the Employee Lens

  4. What the Lab Revealed: Three Critical Gaps Limited Primary Care’s Role Today

  5. Making the Insights Tangible: Signals of What’s Possible

  6. What Employers Can Do Now

  7. The Future of Employer Healthcare Runs Through Primary Care

Primary Care Is the Most Underutilized Lever in Employer Healthcare

Employers are actively reshaping how healthcare works by investing in digital tools, expanding access points, and experimenting with new models of care. Yet as these ecosystems grow more sophisticated, many organizations are recognizing a common challenge: without a strong coordinating center, even the best individual solutions struggle to deliver their full value. The opportunity today is twofold: for some employers, it means thoughtfully introducing primary care capabilities where gaps exist; for others, it means better connecting the ones already in place, creating a healthcare experience that is more navigable, preventive, and aligned to employee needs.

The stakes are high. More than 60% of U.S. adults live with at least one chronic condition, and over 40% manage two or more conditions that require longitudinal, coordinated care. Primary care plays a critical role in preventing, detecting, and managing chronic conditions over time. Yet despite its central role in prevention and navigation, more than 100 million Americans still lack reliable access to primary care, and less than 5% of total U.S. healthcare spending flows directly to primary care. This imbalance helps explain why employers continue to see rising costs alongside fragmented employee experiences.

That coordinating layer is often best positioned to be primary care, but today, it rarely functions that way. In most employer health strategies, primary care still serves primarily as a referral engine rather than the operating system of the healthcare ecosystem. When primary care lacks the authority, incentives, and data needed to coordinate care across physical health, behavioral health, and chronic conditions, fragmentation persists and downstream costs escalate.

Recognizing this gap, Aon convened employers and innovators through its Accelerate Labs program to explore a central question:

How might we redesign primary care to serve as the front door to a more connected, efficient, and human-centered health ecosystem?

Inside the Aon Accelerate Lab on Primary Care

The goal was not to “build” new offerings, but to re‑envision what effective primary care could look like, and then extrapolate what employers can begin doing now within their existing ecosystems.

The Primary Care Accelerate Lab was designed to move beyond incremental improvements and surface bold, system‑level strategies. Aon brought together a cross‑section of innovators from across the healthcare ecosystem (organizations spanning advanced primary care, behavioral health, navigation, analytics, and equity‑focused care delivery) to work in a rapid, design‑led environment.

Seeing Primary Care Through the Employee Lens

Rather than starting with products or predefined solutions, the lab focused on reframing the problem. Participants examined how employees actually experience primary care today, where coordination breaks down, and which structural barriers prevent primary care from fulfilling its potential as a central hub for care, data, and decision‑making.

The digitally enabled employee navigating fragmented care

Darius, a 32-year-old software engineer, uses health apps, wearables and telehealth services regularly. But when it comes to managing his health across providers, he encounters disconnected portals and fragmented information. Without a consistent primary care relationship coordinating his care, he is left managing complexity on his own.

The hourly worker facing access barriers

Efren, 25, works hourly warehouse jobs and does not have paid time off. When he experienced a back injury, he delayed care because of the time and cost involved in seeking treatment. For many workers in similar roles, primary care is not a reliable first step, it becomes an option only after problems escalate.

The caregiver navigating multiple systems at once

Priya, a 34-year-old new mother working in finance, is balancing postpartum recovery, infant care and a demanding job. She must navigate separate care systems for maternal health, pediatric care and mental health support, often without clear guidance or coordination.

These experiences are not edge cases. Without a strong primary care foundation, even minor health issues can escalate into complex, costly chronic disease management failures. Across employer populations, employees with inconsistent primary care relationships are significantly more likely to rely on emergency services and specialty care as their first point of contact, driving higher costs and poorer care continuity. As health ecosystems become more complex, greater emphasis is shifting from innovation strategy to how primary care is positioned and executed in practice.

What the Lab Revealed: Three Critical Gaps Limited Primary Care’s Role Today

As employers add digital tools, specialty providers, and navigation solutions, primary care often remains disconnected, functioning as a referral point rather than a coordinating foundation. Discussions in the lab surfaced critical gaps to structure, incentives and enablement, preventing primary care from fulfilling a broader role across physical health, behavioral health, data, and navigation.  Rather than tackling this as a single problem, the Accelerate Lab anchored each team around one of these dimensions, using them as distinct starting points to explore how primary care could evolve beyond its traditional role.

Payment models still reward referrals, not outcomes

Primary care remains constrained by fee‑for‑service structures that prioritize volume over longitudinal accountability. Without incentives tied to prevention, coordination, and outcomes, primary care providers are limited in their ability to manage total cost of care or act as true stewards of employee health.

Behavioral health is still treated as an add‑on, not a foundation

Mental health needs frequently surface in primary care settings, yet behavioral health services are often delivered through separate networks, data systems, and workflows. This separation delays care, increases complexity for employees, and undermines whole‑person health management.

Data fragmentation prevents meaningful coordination

Employers have invested heavily in digital tools, analytics, and navigation solutions, but most operate in silos. Without interoperable data flowing through primary care, even advanced models struggle to guide employees effectively across providers, conditions, and life stages.

These gaps are not new, but the lab reinforced that addressing them in isolation will not work. To sustainably deliver coordinated care, incentives, integration, and information need to be aligned to empower a primary role for primary care. 

Making the Insights Tangible: Signals of What’s Possible

To bring these themes to life, lab participants explored several conceptual models, each designed to illustrate how primary care could evolve to drive more efficient and effective care across the healthcare system. 

Each concept reflects a different lens explored in the Lab, illustrating what could become possible if primary care were designed differently.

Advancing value-based primary care models (MERGE)

The MERGE concept reflects the lab’s insight that primary care cannot function as a coordinating hub while operating under fragmented, volume‑driven incentives. Named to emphasize alignment and integration, MERGE explores how shared accountability across employers, health plans, and providers could reduce administrative burden, accelerate adoption of advanced primary care models, and shift focus from referrals to longitudinal outcomes. The concept illustrates what becomes possible when payment models are designed to support coordination rather than work around it.

Embedding Mental Health Into Whole‑Person Care (Longevidi)

Longevidi emerged from the lab’s recognition that behavioral health must be foundational, not optional, to effective primary care. The name reflects a focus on longevity and quality of life, signaling a more holistic approach to health. This concept envisions a primary care experience where mental and physical health are seamlessly integrated, supported by unified data and coordinated navigation, enabling providers to address the full spectrum of employee needs in a more human‑centered way.

Enabling patient-centered data and navigation (Clarity)

Clarity was developed in response to the lab’s insight that data fragmentation is one of the greatest barriers to effective care coordination. The concept name underscores the goal of simplifying complexity for both employees and care teams. Clarity envisions a model where individuals have access to portable, patient‑owned health data paired with intelligent navigation, enabling primary care to guide decisions across providers, conditions, and moments of care with greater confidence and continuity. 

Taken together, these concepts reinforce a central insight from the Accelerate Lab: the future of employer healthcare does not solely hinge on adding more access. It depends on strengthening primary care’s role as the connective tissue: aligning incentives, integrating mental and physical health, and enabling data to flow in service of better coordination, outcomes, and experience. 

What Employers Can Do Now

The concepts surfaced through the Accelerate Lab are not prescriptive solutions, but future‑state visions designed to challenge current assumptions and push market thinking around the role of primary care. While many of these shifts will take time to fully materialize, employers do not need to wait for the healthcare system to transform before taking meaningful steps to strengthen primary care today.

To build a stronger foundation now, employers can focus on three simple actions:

  1. Audit the primary care experience across the ecosystem
    Evaluate where primary care fits within the current benefits strategy and identify gaps in access, coordination and integration across services such as behavioral health, chronic condition management and specialty care.
  2. Leverage data to identify access and equity gaps
    Analytics tools such as geographic access mapping and utilization analysis can help employers identify areas where employees face barriers to primary care access and redesign networks accordingly.
  3. Align incentives with outcomes and coordination
    Align and incent vendors and provider partners to support integrated care models that prioritize prevention, care coordination and measurable outcomes rather than volume of services.

The Future of Employer Healthcare Runs Through Primary Care 

The Primary Care Accelerate Lab reinforced a simple but powerful insight: when primary care is designed, incentivized, and enabled to coordinate care, it can unlock greater value across the entire ecosystem. The concepts explored through the Lab are not end states, but signals illustrating what becomes possible when primary care functions as the connective tissue of employer healthcare. 

Aon Accelerate Labs will continue to bring employers and innovators together to explore timely, high impact challenges and translate insight into action.

Thank you to the participants of the Primary Care Challenge, Aon Accelerate Lab: Crossover Health; EmsanaCare; Evernorth; Global Appropriateness Measures (GAM); Lyra; Violet.

Special thank you to our facilitation partners at www.Creaturestudio.com. 

General Disclaimer

This document is not intended to address any specific situation or to provide legal, regulatory, financial, or other advice. While care has been taken in the production of this document, Aon does not warrant, represent or guarantee the accuracy, adequacy, completeness or fitness for any purpose of the document or any part of it and can accept no liability for any loss incurred in any way by any person who may rely on it. Any recipient shall be responsible for the use to which it puts this document. This document has been compiled using information available to us up to its date of publication and is subject to any qualifications made in the document.

Terms of Use

The contents herein may not be reproduced, reused, reprinted or redistributed without the expressed written consent of Aon, unless otherwise authorized by Aon. To use information contained herein, please write to our team.

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