Integration or Irrelevance: Why Digital Health Providers Must Fit into Benefits

If you aren’t built into the benefit, you aren’t built to last.

It’s a hard truth — but one digital health leaders need to confront. The era when employers or health plans would entertain one-off point solutions that sit outside the benefits framework is over. Budgets are tightening, patience is short, and benefits leaders are looking for simplicity, not yet another silo. In today’s market, the difference between scaling and stalling isn’t your app’s user interface, or your engagement campaign. It’s whether you’re integrated into the benefits structure itself.

The Employer and Plan Perspective: Simplicity, Not Another Silo

Employers and health plans have no shortage of inbound pitches from digital health vendors. Each one promises ROI, improved engagement, and better outcomes. But the reality is this: every stand-alone contract creates friction. Each new vendor introduces another layer of contracting, data sharing, compliance reviews, and administrative work.

Benefits leaders are under pressure to do more with less, streamline oversight, and ensure a clean employee and member experience. They’re not looking for the “next new thing. ”They’re looking for solutions that fold seamlessly into what’s already working.A fragmented digital health landscape is the opposite of what they need — it complicates workflows, drives costs, and frustrates members who are already overwhelmed by too many portals and log-ins.

In other words, if your solution can’t integrate, it doesn’t matter how innovative it is. You won’t get the traction you need.

The Cost of Fragmentation

When digital health solutions operate in isolation, the costs pile up quickly:

·     Operational inefficiency: Each new vendor requires its own contracting, compliance, and billing processes. For benefits teams managing dozens of point solutions, that overhead is unsustainable.

·     Member confusion: Employees don’t know which portal to use, which app to download, or which program applies to their benefit. Confusion leads to poor utilization, which in turn undercuts outcomes.

·     Diluted ROI: With no shared data infrastructure, outcomes are hard to measure credibly.Leaders face a patchwork of vanity metrics that fail to tell the real story about cost savings or improved health.

The message from employer sand health plans is clear: fragmentation erodes value. If you’re not integrated into the broader benefit ecosystem, you’re on borrowed time.

Integration as the Differentiator

Digital health providers that succeed in scaling aren’t necessarily the flashiest or the most heavily funded. They’re the ones that figured out how to integrate. That means aligning with:

·     Benefit structures: Plugging into existing plan designs so your solution isn’t “extra,”it’s embedded.

·     On-prem and in-network care: Ensuring providers see your solution as an extension of their care, not competition.

·     Claims systems: So employers and health plans can measure results with the same rigor they use across the rest of healthcare.

When digital health solutions fit into the way benefits and care are actually delivered, they move from being “nice to have” to “must have.” Integration creates credibility, staying power, and scale.

Solera's Role

This is exactly where Solera comes in. Our network was built to solve the integration problem for both sides of the equation. For digital health providers, Solera offers:

·     A single point of entry into plans and employers: Instead of knocking on doors one by one, you gain access through a platform already embedded in benefit designs.

·     Claims-based billing and reporting: That means your outcomes are measured credibly, and payers can trust the data.

·     Operational ease: Compliance, contracting, and member engagement are streamlined through Solera’s infrastructure, reducing friction for all parties.

Put simply, Solera is the multiplier that transforms an innovative solution into one that scales. We don’t just connect you to the market — we integrate you into it.

Closing Charge: Integrate or Fade Into the Noise

The digital health market is more crowded than ever, and benefit leaders have heard every ROI claim under the sun. What they’re asking now is simple: does this solution fit cleanly into my benefits and care ecosystem, or does it add friction?

Providers who integrate will scale. Providers who don’t will fade into the noise.

At Solera, we’ve built the infrastructure to make integration possible (and profitable) for digital health innovators. The only question is whether you’ll harness it.

Join us at HLTH 2025 in Las Vegas to learn how you can harness the power of the Solera Network, join, and make waves in healthcare.

👉 Reserve your spot here.

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