Unifying Medical and Pharmacy Benefits: The Blueprint for Better Employee Health and Wellness

Rising healthcare costs and increasing complexity have made it impossible to ignore the cracks in our healthcare system. For most self-funded employers, health benefits – including medical, pharmacy, vision, and dental coverage – represent one of the largest annual expenditures. And year in and year out, the challenge for plan sponsors is to understand what they are paying for and how to control unchecked inflation while providing their plan members with benefits that support – and promote – health and wellness. 

For decades, medical and pharmacy benefits have operated in silos. Why not combine them and take a holistic view of total costs? For the first time, in 2025, a unified pharmacy and medical benefits experience was deployed, and this session will unpack how streamlining core claim administrative functions and workflows can address the root causes of inefficiency and waste in traditional benefit structures to achieve the lowest net cost without sacrificing service levels.

Join us to uncover some innovative strategies to transform your health benefits program into a cornerstone of employee well-being, positive outcomes, and organizational growth.

Together, we will touch on:

1. The traditional fragmentation problem and how separate benefits administration systems allow inefficiencies to persist
2. What “unified claims processing” is and how it’s different from traditional, vertically integrated benefits models
3. How to obtain and leverage plan data to inform vendor selection and plan design decisions
4. The critical role of comprehensive data visibility and how to identify areas of waste that can be immediately addressed