Employers Need a New Answer to Rising Healthcare Costs

Healthcare costs are going up. Again.

And employers are running out of places to put them.

That was the conversation Rezilient Health CEO Danish Nagda, MD, joined on CNBC this week: what can employers actually do about rising healthcare costs besides shifting more of the burden to employees?

For years, that has been one of the most common responses. Higher premiums. Higher deductibles. Reduced coverage. More cost passed along to employees.

But shifting the cost doesn’t solve the problem. It just changes who pays for it.

And when employees respond by delaying care, skipping appointments or waiting until something becomes urgent, healthcare can get even more expensive.

Employers need another lever.

What if we changed the care instead?

At Rezilient, we believe primary care can be one of the most powerful places to change the economics of healthcare.

Not because primary care itself represents the biggest line item in an employer’s healthcare spend.

Because it can influence what happens next.

When people can get care the same day, problems can be addressed earlier. Chronic conditions can be managed before they escalate. An urgent need may not become an ER visit. A question for a specialist may not require another appointment weeks or months later.

That’s why we think of primary care as the front door to healthcare, not another point solution.

And the front door has to lead somewhere.

Rezilient connects primary and urgent care with specialty e-consults across 70+ specialties and care navigation, giving providers more resources to resolve care at the first point of contact and helping members navigate what comes next when additional care is needed.

The goal isn’t more healthcare.

It’s the right care, earlier.

AI can help change the economics of delivering it

There’s another part of this equation that Danish discussed on CNBC: AI.

Providers spend significant time on work that isn’t actually taking care of patients. Documentation, administrative tasks, routine requests and other work all compete for their attention.

AI creates an opportunity to take some of that burden off providers.

That matters because the goal isn’t to replace the physician. It’s to give the physician more capacity to practice medicine.

If technology can handle more of the work that doesn’t require a physician, providers can spend more time on the work that does.

That makes high-touch, highly accessible care more scalable. And ultimately, it can help change the economics of delivering better care.

Watch Danish Nagda discuss AI, primary care and employer healthcare costs on CNBC.

And employers are looking for a different model

That brings us to another big announcement this week.

Gateway Business Health Coalition, which represents approximately 70 employers nationwide, has partnered with Rezilient to expand access to our advanced hybrid primary care model for its members.

The partnership starts with primary care, but it is designed around the much bigger challenge employers face: what happens after someone walks through the front door.

Earlier intervention.

More resolved in primary care.

Faster access to specialty expertise.

Better navigation when additional care is needed.

A more connected experience instead of another solution added to an already fragmented healthcare system.

For employers, the conversation about healthcare costs can’t only be about how much more they can absorb, how much more employees can absorb or what gets cut next.

We need to start changing the care those dollars are buying.

That’s what we’re building at Rezilient.

And with partners like Gateway BHC, we have an opportunity to do it at a much bigger scale.