Healthcare is now the second largest employer cost after payroll — and the moderate-risk employees quietly heading toward high-cost events are the ones nobody is watching.
Engagement platforms build culture. Clinical navigation reacts after something goes wrong. Neither alone solves the cost problem. Personify Health’s PercyIQ engine combines biometrics, device data, HRA signals, and behavioral patterns to identify risk before it escalates — meeting each employee with a personalized journey, not a generic program. A pilot on their own workforce achieved high-risk engagement nearly 3x the industry average.
The cost problem nobody can ignore anymore
Healthcare costs aren’t just rising. They’re reshaping how employers think about their P&L.
For many organizations healthcare has quietly become the second largest line item – right behind payroll. And the trend isn’t slowing down. Employer healthcare costs have surged more than over the past decade, and year-over-year increases are nearing double digits.
And it’s getting harder to absorb. This kind of trajectory doesn’t just strain budgets. It puts pressure on everything: your people investments, your growth plans, your future.
Most organizations haven’t been passive. They’ve added point solutions, navigation tools, wellness programs, vendor partnerships. But the savings haven’t always followed. Costs keep climbing, utilization stays fragmented, and the ROI is hard to prove. Unfortunately, more spend hasn’t meant more control.
That’s the hardest part to sit with. For the benefits leader in the middle of it, the problem isn’t just cost – it’s not having a story to tell. The board wants a plan, the CFO wants a number, and employees need coverage and support. And right now, most benefits leaders are managing all three with tools that weren’t built to work together.
So, the question every Benefits and HR leader is asking right now isn’t whetherto act. It’s how.
Why the old playbook isn’t enough
- Engagement platforms have done a great job bringing employees together. Step challenges. Cultural initiatives. Wellbeing programs that get people invested in their organization. Engagement is a critical foundation. The question is what you build on top of it.
- On the other side, clinical navigation platforms drive real outcomes, but only after something has already gone wrong. An encounter happens. A claim comes in. Then the intervention starts. By that point, you’ve already lost.
The result? The moderate-risk middle – employees who aren’t sick enough to flag but are quietly heading toward high-cost events – get ignored until it’s too late.
As Ed Liebowitz , President and General Manager of Health Engagement at Personify Health, put it at our annual Thrive Summit event: “You can’t change outcomes after they show up. If we continue to wait for encounter data to come in to advise a consumer on a better health choice, you’ve already lost the battle.”
Doing both things well — and connecting them — is the challenge the industry has been working to crack.
The Personify approach: One platform, one personalized journey
Personify Health is a personalized health engagement platform that guides every member – regardless of where they are on their health journey – to next steps before small issues become costly. We’ve spent 20+ years building the engagement foundation that makes this possible. And now, we’re combining it with population intelligence to meet every member where they are and move them forward from there.
The engine powering this is PercyIQ – our intelligence engine that brings together biometric data, connected device signals (think Oura rings, Fitbits, etc.), lab draws, HRA risk indicators, benefits utilization, and behavioral engagement patterns – a clear picture of what’s driving risk across your workforce and what to do about it.
PercyIQ turns this insight into action: personalized guidance, proactive outreach, and human coaching informed by AI-driven insights. The result? A macro plan that tells you what’s happening across your organization, and a micro plan that meets each employee exactly where they are.
What “personalized” actually looks like
This isn’t personalization as a buzzword. It’s meaningful and powerful. Here’s what it looks like in practice:
- Paula is a working mom in Atlanta. Her labs show an elevated A1C – she’s pre-diabetic. She also averages fewer than 600 steps a day and carries high stress. A generic wellness program might tell Paula to hit 10,000 steps. Personify starts her at 1,000. Small wins build momentum. Her journey is designed around her – including her love of jazz – not around a clinical condition checklist.
- Leo is a frequent flyer in West Palm Beach who shows up in our platform with knee pain. Instead of defaulting to an expensive in-person orthopedic visit, our platform ingests his plan design, identifies that virtual PT through Sword Health is the right fit, and guides him there – 30% cheaper than the traditional route. As Leo improves, we introduce cultural engagement opportunities to re-connect him with his organization. Cost containment and culture, working together.
- Hannah is a recently promoted manager in Denver who’s caregiving for aging parents. She’s eating well and exercising, but her anxiety is wrecking her sleep. We know she has an Oura ring, so instead of replicating the Oura experience, we leverage her sleep data to build a personalized seven-day sleep challenge. When she’s still struggling, we don’t push harder – we ask if she wants help building a better routine. We meet her where she is.
Three people. Three entirely different needs. One platform helping them make healthier easier.
As an HR Leader, this is what it looks like to get ahead of health outcomes and costs instead of reacting them.
Insights that move the needle
We’re also changing how employers use their own data.
With our insight into action engine, we ingest broker trend reports, apply AI to surface what’s driving cost in your population, and run it against years of Personify best practices to generate a recommended action plan automatically. No more starting every annual business review from scratch. You get a smarter starting point, with the ability to configure and act on it immediately.
We piloted this on our own employee population. MSK conditions turned out to be our third largest medical spend — roughly 10% of total medical costs, affecting about half our workforce.
We identified 2,000 low-risk and 500 high-risk employees, built two distinct outreach strategies, and launched targeted campaigns to each group. The high-risk engagement rate came in at nearly three times the industry average. And here’s what surprised us most: more than 20% of each cohort went on to explore other clinical conditions beyond MSK. Get the entry point right, and people open up to the broader journey.
For the benefits leader who’s been telling the engagement story for years but getting pushed on cost, this is the shift: a platform that connects engagement to clinical action to measurable cost avoidance. Not an engagement story for HR and a separate cost story for finance. One story that holds in both rooms.
That’s what separates Personify from everything else in the market.
The bigger mission: Changing how healthy happens
This work isn’t just a product roadmap. For the Personify team, it’s deeply personal.
Ed’s personal journey as a former athlete living with type 1 diabetes fuels his commitment to advancing health and wellbeing. He knows firsthand how hard it is to navigate a chronic condition – assembling a care team, making sense of data, and finding the right resources at the right time. It’s a big part of why he joined
Personify, and why the entire organization is so committed to making this mission real.
“Health is individual,” Ed said. “And if we look at people on an episodic basis and just think about them as a clinical condition, we’re never going to get to the solution.”
We’re building something different. An approach that treats every person in your workforce as a whole human being – not a claim, not a cohort, not a condition.
The bottom line for benefits leaders
Healthcare costs aren’t going to fix themselves. But the old model of waiting for something to go wrong – and then reacting – isn’t a strategy. It’s a delay.
The opportunity in front of HR and benefits leaders right now is to get ahead of it: to engage employees early, meet them where they are, and connect the dots between wellness, benefits, and clinical care in a way that actually moves the needle on outcomes and costs. That’s how your wellbeing investment stops becoming a culture line item and starts becoming a clinical one.
That’s what Personify Health is building. And we’d love to show you what it looks like for your population.
Ready to see what a personalized health journey could look like for your workforce? Let’s talk.