Rezilient Summit 2025 HR Panel

At our 2025 Inaugural Healthcare Summit in St. Louis in early August, Danish Nagda, Rezilient CEO and Co-Founder was joined by Stacie Harrell, HR Director at Cosmos Corp to discuss how one of Rezilient's earliest customers has shown incredible success in controlling their healthcare costs through persistence and education.

In case you missed our Summit, catch the whole discussion on the video below and in the transcript.

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Jeff Gamble

We have Stacie Harrell, who is the Director of Human Resources at Cosmos Corporation, with over 20 years of experience in talent strategy, organizational development, and employee engagement. A people-focused change leader, she began her career with the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company and has since built a track record of aligning HR strategy with business goals across sectors.

At Cosmos, she leads initiatives that strengthen leadership, enhance employee experience, and bring company culture to life. And, you know, from the perspective of resilience, Cosmos was one of our early, early customers, and they have really watched our evolution over the years. And so really looking forward to hearing this talk.

Danish Nagda

The one thing I want our existing customers to know is that we are always thinking about you. We don't forget about the people that got us here because they're actually the people that helped us get good at what we do.

I wanted people to kind of get the HR perspective. What do you wish employees knew about how benefits work at the company?

Stacie Harrell

What I wish they knew is that their behavior and the way that they use the health benefits actually do affect their premiums and their healthcare costs, not only for themselves, but also for the people that they work with.

What I mean by that is if you're on Ozempic and you eat fettuccine for dinner and then cheesecake for dessert and expect to still be healthy, that’s not going to work. If you don't stay in network with your providers and you go to the hospital all the time, instead of your primary care, your costs are going to go up the next year quite a bit.

And then you're going to complain about that to your HR professional and your CEO. And then your CEO is going to have to stand up in front of the town hall, explain why this has gone up. True story.

What I want them to understand is how they behave this year will affect their costs next year. And what I want them to understand is that this is a joint effort. That the way that they behave is something that we can all take control over and that they're also an owner of their healthcare, that they're a co-owner of healthcare. It's not just their insurance that's paying for it. They're a part of that too.

Danish

It's interesting because many people don't realize that we work with employers that are taking on the risk of their people and the health of their people.

And that's not an individual risk. It's a joint risk. So as you're meeting with patients, as we're taking care of people, it's really important to understand that maybe they don't even understand that aspect of it.

Now, it's not our job to figure that out, obviously for you all. But we also have a fiduciary responsibility. For people that don't kind of get it, I'm going to put it in an even more direct term.

If the money is not going to the health plan, it can go to the people. And if the money is going to go to the health plan, it comes from the people. And that's the harder part. That's the difficult part.

And I think that's why I wanted to start there because we always think about like employers offering health insurance and we're like, oh, it doesn't make sense or whatever. But ultimately, it is what it is. And we are where we are.

So they have a role to play. Now, you all made a very conscious decision to fully cover 100% of the cost of primary care for your people and offer them concierge care through Rezilient. That was probably not easy because you're making an investment. And as one of my mentors said, primary care is an investment, everything else is spending on healthcare. And it's one of the things I've always believed. And how did you all come to that conclusion that, hey, we're going to cover concierge primary care for our people?

Stacie

We wanted our employees to walk in every day and feel free from health and worries.

And so we wanted them to walk in and focus on their job and not worry about their health and not worry about, oh, I don't feel good today. It might be two months before I get into my doctor. We wanted them to be able to go down the street and less than 10 minutes away and be able to see a doctor that day or virtually or for out-of-state employees, be able to go online and see their primary care provider within a day or two and not have to worry about how much it's going to cost.

Do I buy food for my family or do I actually go to the doctor? We wanted them to not worry about going to see the doctor. We wanted them to be able to focus on their job. And if they come into work every day and they're focused on their job, they feel better about themselves.

They do a better job on focusing on themselves and focusing on their job. And then they know that we care and that just makes a better workplace. If they know that we care, it creates a better culture.

And they do know we care and they do know that Rezilient cares. And so that's why we did that.

Danish

We have some employers here in the room and some brokers. One of the big questions they always ask us is, well, how are you going to get people to actually use this? We get that question more than anyone else. And I think it's partially because the doctors are on the screen. I think [patient] Becky said something really interesting. “I’d rather have a doctor on the screen that listens to me than a doctor in person that doesn't care.” I remember when I watched that, it meant something.

Cosmos has one of the highest engagement percentages, by maybe double, of everybody else. And they have done an incredible job. We have done a good job, obviously, with our marketing team.

But at the same time, it takes two partners here. What do you think has been the secret sauce of how you all have done such high engagement in your population? What can other people learn from that?

Stacie

One thing, we know our employee, so we know how to get them. We know what attracts them. So one, we know our employees. And when I say we, it's leadership.

HR knows their employees. CEO knows our employees. Leadership knows our employees.

Two is, you just said, you take the money that you're saving on healthcare and you're reinvesting it back into the employees. So that's what we're doing.

We're educating them. We are educating them on healthcare. We're educating them on Rezilient over and over again

But we make it fun and we make it worth their while. So for example, every single time our employees fill out an intake form or their dependents fill out an intake form, they get their name put into a drawing, okay? That name stays in there all year long. It never gets taken out.

That drawing happens every single quarter. And it starts out small, but it builds big. Starts out with, okay, we're going to give you an extra day off, okay? And $50.

That's nothing to us. It's huge to them. Okay, now, when you go to your first primary care visit with Rezilient, we're gonna put two of your names in there and your dependent names.

Two of your names. Doesn't matter who goes in your family. You're gonna get two more names in there.

If everybody in your family goes, that’s two names per person. The next drawing, we're gonna give you two extra vacation days off. We're gonna give you $100. Your name stays in there.

Remember, doesn't matter how many times your name stays in there. If you go to the dentist, your name gets put back in there. If you go to this lunch and learn that Rezilient's going to put on, we're gonna get your name in there again.

So on and so forth. By the end of the year, you're getting a extra week's vacation. You're getting $250 spending money.

And you're getting an Airbnb gift card. You're utilizing the healthcare that we're giving you. We're educating you because you're going to the lunch and learns.

And you're doing what we're asking you to do. And we're also rewarding you at the same time. It's a win, win, win for all of us.

Danish

It's kind of interesting, isn't it? We have to convince people to see a concierge doctor. And there are always situations where people put their hands up and they say, it's your job to go figure this out. But Stacey and Landon and the rest of the Cosmos team, y'all see it as an investment.

It is an actual investment. You're like, if they use primary care, I know my premiums are going to go down. I know my total costs are going to go down.

And by the way, how much does Rezilient charge for the fifth visit? Zero dollars. The sixth visit, zero dollars. We don't charge the more they use.

So it's in their best interest to give those raffles away. If you are an employer or a broker representing an employer, you de-risk your own strategy. Because again, if you look at it as an investment – we have some of our investors here – they spend a lot of time making sure that their investment is taken care of.

But sometimes people will make the investment in primary care and then do nothing. They'll be like, all right, we'll see you later. It's your job to get those numbers for me. I'll see you at QBR. We'll figure it out. And then you show up at QBR. And of course our numbers are good, but they're not Cosmos good. Very few people have that because they're investing. And it's saving them a lot of money. You'll hear also from Landon, it's saving them so much money because they're just thinking one step ahead.

What advice would you give another HR person who is actively combating rising costs?

Stacie

Lay out the year. Come up with a strategic plan for the entire year.

Know who your employees are. Know how they're going to act because you should know how they're going to act throughout that year. Lay out the education platform that you want to teach them throughout that next year.

And teach them. Educate them. Reward them for their behavior.

When we have children, we teach them what we want them to know to succeed in life and to be healthy. Do the same thing with your employees. You care about them.

You want them to succeed at your company so they do well. Same thing there. And CEOs, reward your HR executive.

Danish

What kind of direct feedback have you received about Rezilient from your employees?

Stacie

They love it. They absolutely love it.

We have employees all over the world, actually. In all different states. And we've gotten nothing but great feedback.

We send out a survey at the end of every year before the next year starts. And we have not received one negative comment except right at the very beginning. And [Rezilient] were on it every single time. Those kinks have now been fixed.

Danish

In terms of employee education, Kent was asking, what have you found to be most impactful?

Stacie

In-person lunch and learns. Provide food. Seriously, it's what people want. We give away gifts every single time. Pick topics that you know your employees want to hear.

We launched an HSA program. They don't understand HSA. So we had information about HSA.

If we know our employees are working on a lot of projects and they're overwhelmed, then we have Rezilient talk about mental health. If we, you know, it just depends on what's going on in your company at the time and you know what they're struggling with. And that's what we asked Rezilient to come in and talk about.

Danish

The reason why Stacy's here on stage, the reason why they have been so successful with Rezilient, and honestly, the reason why we look to them as our sort of North Star and how an employer should do something is because she keeps saying, you need to know your people.

I don't know if you've heard her say that like 18 times, which is good. That is their culture.

They ask for feedback. And a lot of times brokers and employers may not want to hear what people think about their healthcare. I don't know if y'all know, people are not very happy with health insurance these days. So they have a “we're in this together” attitude. We're going to have a conversation. We're going to meet a lot.

And I think that's the key to solving this is cooperation. And we are lucky that we are cooperating so closely with them. They have been an incredible partner.

Despite our parking kinks, despite every kink along the way, we've literally been able to execute with them and we couldn't be here without you. Thank you, Stacie.

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See full recaps of all the panel discussions from our 2025 Inaugural Healthcare Summit on our blog.