We recently asked some employers one adjective that best describes what they want Holmes Murphy to be. Using their cell phones in a free-form survey, the word that received the greatest number of responses was “innovative.”

I admit, seeing that response up on the screen made me smile and nod my head. If they only knew what we had brewing!

We often describe our subsidiary ACAP Health as an “innovation lab” and have been fortunate to offer some of the very best industry innovations over the years. But 2018 was a little (OK, maybe a lot) different. It’s the year we decided to move beyond innovation to transformation with the introduction of SimplePay Health. And we’re pretty eager to tell you about it!

To put some context around how excited I am, I’ve got a little story for you (and it’s true!). After returning home from a long road trip several weeks ago, my wife Karen asked me why I was working so hard to launch SimplePay Health. After 26 years of marriage, it was a fair question. She has watched the blood, sweat, and tears we put into launching programs like Naturally Slim and Compass over the years. She just couldn’t wrap her head around why we would want to take on something even more ambitious. We’ve built a great business, and it would be easy to coast to the finish line before hanging up the cleats.

I think it’s an easy, some would say “simple” (pardon the pun), answer. After almost 30 years in healthcare working with the smartest minds in the industry, everything in my being tells me this is our chance to fix what are arguably the most costly, complicated, and emotionally charged areas impacting Americans. It’s this opportunity that has driven our team to overcome countless challenges to build and launch what many said would not be possible. And, we believe SimplePay Health will become the model for how health insurance will work in the future.

For those of you not involved in the trenches, you may be wondering what in the world I’m talking about when I refer to SimplePay Health. Let me go into a bit more detail. For the first time, we now have the ability (based on one of the country’s largest claim and quality databases — data on over 80 million Americans) to identify from national networks of doctors and hospitals, the providers who deliver the highest quality and most efficient care. The difference in cost for high quality care can vary by 400 percent or more.

We have combined this powerful data with a simplified insurance design and experience for patients. Healthcare now works like purchasing any online consumer product. Patients know the provider quality displayed in a 5-star scale and have a single out-of-pocket cost — we call it a SimplePay — that is fixed and never changes. Gone are surprise bills to patients and all the confusing insurance terms like deductibles, coinsurance, etc.

We believe this is the future of employer-sponsored healthcare, and I’m proud to be a part of the greater Holmes Murphy enterprise — an organization that not only embraces innovation but also transformation.

I’d love to talk with you about SimplePay Health and answer any questions you may have. Feel free to comment below or reach out directly!