The next evolution of fertility and family-building benefits
As awareness has grown, family-building benefits are rapidly becoming standard components within modern benefit packages.
Fertility and family-building benefits are in high demand. Surveys show that employers are increasingly looking to cover services such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), elective egg freezing, adoption, and surrogacy as a way to foster an inclusive workplace and attract and retain talent as we continue to face one of the most challenging hiring environments in recent memory.
That more employers from across industries are choosing to cover these services is something to celebrate. When I started Maven in 2014, fertility and family-building coverage was rare, offered only by a handful of the world’s largest companies. Today, as awareness has grown about both the scale of employee need and the accessibility offered by new solutions, these offerings are rapidly becoming standard components within modern benefit packages.
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This push into the mainstream comes at a watershed moment. After years of neglect and innovation on the margins of the employee experience, we are now entering a new era for fertility and family-building where benefits recenter on the twin goals of improving employee health and wellbeing, as well as ensuring that employers are getting value for the dollars they’re spending.
A quick look back at the history of this space shows why this is needed. The earliest benefit approaches, requiring a medical diagnosis to access infertility support, excluded LGBTQIA+ employees and single parents, while exacerbating the stress and anxiety people often feel when going through these journeys. The next phase predominantly focused on financial innovation to improve access to care for all, with carve-out solutions supporting all pathways to parenthood, including surrogacy, adoption and fertility preservation. This has reduced the cost burden on employees for the most expensive forms of treatment.
We’ve now come full circle, where it’s not just about financial innovation, but also about health care impact. Benefit leaders well-versed in selecting health care benefits for their full populations know that health care coverage is most valuable when it actually works to make employees healthier — which over time, helps to reduce an employer’s overall costs. In the realm of fertility and family-building benefits, that means helping people welcome a new child into their lives in the shortest possible period, regardless of the path to parenthood. This is how benefit leaders are choosing their fertility and family-building benefits today — leveraging the improvements of the past decade to make support more inclusive and financially manageable — while restoring its place within health care as a whole.
For those seeking insight into how to achieve this, here are three principles to guide your search.
1. Fertility and family-building benefits should deliver an exceptional employee experience
Fertility and family-building journeys can be taxing, emotionally as well as physically, and are riddled with complexity and misinformation. This makes it all the more important that a fertility and family-building benefit makes the right care and support more accessible to all employees — regardless of where they live, how they identify and how they are seeking to grow their families — and more personalized to their specific path to parenthood.
The best way to achieve this is to provide benefits that meet employees where they are with a digital-first platform. In choosing a digital-first fertility and family-building benefit, employers ensure that every employee has fast access to a full range of services, providers and educational resources — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Digital-first benefits are uniquely capable of supporting the physical, emotional and financial aspects of fertility and family-building journeys. They can bring a wide variety of providers and educational resources together under one roof in the way that navigation-based benefits cannot. That breadth and depth is important when looking to support the diversity of these experiences. Consider that these are some of the questions we hear on Maven every day:
- “How should I manage my thyroid condition while going through IVF?”
- “Do you know of any mental health providers experienced in secondary infertility?”
- “Can you help me find a sperm donor who shares my background?”
- “When should my partner and I explain my son’s adoption to him, and what does that sound like?”
Each of these questions left unanswered would exacerbate the anxiety that employees feel while navigating these deeply personal experiences. Answering them in a timely manner, connecting employees to experts virtually (if your benefit has the capability) or in person, and most of all, having their care advocate or case manager follow up to ensure their needs were met will help your employees feel their experience is fully supported by their employer.
2. Fertility and family-building benefits should shorten the amount of time to family formation for employees
Employers should expect that their benefit partner is as committed to promoting healthy, happy employees as they are. In fertility and family-building, that means employers should look for partners that take a preventive approach, ensuring that employees always receive appropriate care — no more, no less — while shortening the amount of time employees spend working towards their desired outcome: growing their families in whichever way makes the most sense for their circumstances.
This focus on desired outcomes has been sorely missing from fertility and family-building benefits historically. It has resulted in approaches that often provide too much or too little care based on misaligned incentives between vendors, employers and employees. The reason employers should focus on preventive care and time-to-family-formation is simple: these are the areas where employer and employee goals intersect. Employees want healthy, happy children in as few steps as possible; employers want healthy, happy employees while keeping costs manageable.
Engagement is critical to outcomes, so a clinically sound solution has to have a lot of different modules to drive engagement. It might include: video appointments and text messaging, classes and educational resources, community and peer support, and a 24/7 care advocate or case manager who helps with navigation and stays with your employee through all phases of their journey. Over time, this early and ongoing engagement will not only result in happier, healthier employees, it will also maximize the return on your benefit investment.
3. Fertility benefits should reduce administrative burden and offer maximum flexibility to employers
Flexible benefit design and seamless administration are table stakes for the industry. A benefit that is inflexible, costly to administer and complex to manage will make it harder for employees to get the care they need.
Because of the attention on this space in the last few years, employers have several options for how to design a fertility solution depending on their priorities, either through their existing health plan partner (or partners), through a fertility benefit solution, or a combination of both. Beyond that, employers have a multitude of levers they can pull to ensure they’re achieving their goals, from determining whether a lifetime maximum or cycle-based approach is most appropriate, to working with an open provider network or a model founded on centers of excellence.
For employers, the ability to make these decisions is critical. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work for your employees, and it doesn’t work for you, either. To ensure you’re designing the best benefit to achieve your goals, choose a partner that offers a flexible solution and takes a consultative approach.
There are a million and one questions your employees will have while trying to grow their family, but in the end, what they want most is to know they are taken care of regardless of any twists and turns. They want their expectations appropriately set and their expenses well managed. They don’t want to feel pressured to choose a particular path or provider. Ultimately they want to know their employer has their best interests at heart. Employers that remember this will reap the rewards of an empowered workforce.
Kate Ryder is founder and CEO of Maven Clinic.
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