Healthcare costs keep rising. Employers deserve a better answer.
For years, employers have faced a difficult challenge: Healthcare costs continue to increase, yet many of the solutions designed to address those costs have fallen short. Traditional wellness programs may drive participation but often struggle to create meaningful reductions in healthcare risk. At the same time, many cost-management strategies simply shift additional costs to employees through higher premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses.
The result is a system with misaligned incentives.
While many of the biggest drivers of future healthcare costs, including preventive care, medication adherence, physical activity, sleep, and chronic condition management, remain within an individual’s influence, most health plans fail to create a meaningful connection between health effort and healthcare costs.
Today, we’re introducing Vitality Funding Flex. A new approach to healthcare funding that helps align employees, employers, and the cost of care.
What is Vitality Funding Flex?
Vitality Funding Flex is a healthcare funding model that links medical plan contributions to measurable health-management effort.
Employees who actively engage in improving and managing their health can pay less for healthcare coverage. Employees who choose not to engage contribute more. The goal is not to penalize illness or reward people for simply being healthy. Instead, Vitality Funding Flex is designed to recognize effort, progress, and sustained engagement.
At the center of the model is Vitality status, an independently validated measure of health-management effort built through ongoing engagement across personalized health pathways. These pathways may include activities related to physical activity, sleep, preventive screenings, medication adherence, condition management, coaching, and other health interventions tailored to an individual’s needs.
A different way to think about healthcare funding
Most healthcare financing models focus on what happens after someone becomes a patient. Vitality Funding Flex focuses on everything that happens before.
Rather than treating prevention, engagement, screenings, condition management, and healthy behaviors as separate programs, Vitality Funding Flex connects them directly to healthcare funding. Through personalized pathways and measurable engagement, employees can see a clear relationship between the actions they take and the contributions they make toward their healthcare coverage.
This creates alignment across the healthcare ecosystem:
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- Employees are recognized for taking actions that improve and manage their health.
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- Employers gain a mechanism that encourages engagement while helping address healthcare affordability.
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- The healthcare system benefits when more people participate in prevention, screening, and condition management before higher-cost interventions become necessary.
Powered by Vitality AI
Vitality Funding Flex is enabled by the broader Vitality AI ecosystem. Drawing on decades of behavioral science and more than 60 million life years of health and behavior data, Vitality AI creates personalized pathways designed to help members take the actions most likely to improve health and reduce future risk.
According to Vitality’s analysis, members with higher Vitality status demonstrate 15% lower healthcare claims after adjusting for demographic and clinical differences. These findings have been independently validated by the Validation Institute.
Built Around Accountability
Employers are increasingly asking an important question: How do we know it’s working?
That’s why Vitality has paired Vitality Funding Flex with a 3-year ROI Guarantee.
For qualifying employers, Vitality places 50% of eligible administrative fees at risk. If cumulative net savings over the guarantee period are not positive, a portion of those fees is refunded. The guarantee reflects our belief that healthcare savings should be measured, not assumed.
The Future of Healthcare Funding
Healthcare costs are unlikely to stop rising. But employers have an opportunity to rethink how healthcare is funded.
Vitality Funding Flex represents a new approach. One that connects engagement, incentives, personalized health pathways, and accountability into a single model designed to create value for employees and employers alike.
We’re excited to introduce Vitality Funding Flex and begin the conversation about what a more aligned future for healthcare funding could look like.
Ready to learn more? Connect with the Vitality team to explore how Vitality Funding Flex could fit into your organization’s benefits strategy.
