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Rewards that help members take the next right step

The most impactful health benefits do more than just sit in the background; they guide people towards the next right step. That starts with helping members understand what is available to them and making their next action clear and achievable.

As health plans, employers and other organizations look for new ways to improve engagement, support affordability and deliver more meaningful benefit experiences, rewards can play an important role.

To be effective, rewards need to be more than one-time incentives or disconnected dollars. They need to ensure the action, funding and experience are seamless and simple for members — and valuable for sponsors.

Simplifying a fragmented experience

Today, that experience is often fragmented. A member may receive one message about a health action, go somewhere else to confirm completion, wait for a reward, and then determine where those funds can be spent. Organizations face similar complexity behind the scenes across engagement vendors, payment partners, program administrators and reporting tools.

A new rewards offering from Optum Financial within Healthy Benefits+ is designed to help simplify that journey by bringing earning, funding and spending into one integrated experience.

Expanding the opportunity for rewards

Built on Optum Financial directed spend capabilities and the Healthy Benefits+ platform, the offering can help organizations align reward dollars to meaningful health actions while giving members a more intuitive way to understand and use their rewards.

At a high level, rewards can support healthier actions by making the next step clearer, timelier and aligned to everyday needs. And while directed benefits and rewards programs have often been associated with government-sponsored markets, the opportunity is broader as commercial health plans and employers look for scalable ways to:

Drive stronger engagement
Manage spend
Differentiate their benefits strategies

Moving health forward together

Bringing this vision to life also takes collaboration across the enterprise, combining payments infrastructure, health expertise, program design and analytics in service of a simpler member experience.

For Optum Financial, the opportunity ahead is to help organizations move beyond rewards as a transaction and toward rewards as part of a seamless health journey; one designed not only to move money, but to move health forward.

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About Optum Financial

Optum Financial helps organizations simplify health benefits and connect health care with financial experiences. Through health benefit accounts, payment solutions and supplemental benefit capabilities like Healthy Benefits+, Optum Financial supports health plans, employers and members with tools designed to make benefits and rewards easier to understand, use and manage.

A new era of rewards: Turning incentives into healthier actions