Powering the Age of Connected Insurance with Shannon Goggin, Co-Founder and CEO at Noyo: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Powering the Age of Connected Insurance with Shannon Goggin, Co-Founder and CEO at Noyo: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Saul Marquez:
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Saul Marquez:
Hey everyone, Saul Marquez here. Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket. Today I have the privilege of hosting Shannon Goggin. She is the co-founder and CEO of Noyo, the leading API platform powering the age of connected insurance with a new digital standard for fast, accurate data exchange. Noyo has built the industry’s first universal API designed Specifically for health insurance benefits administration, bringing unparalleled connectivity, ease, and reliability to a previously opaque industry. Shannon, I’m excited to learn more about the work that you guys are doing there and really want to give you a warm welcome to the outcome.

Shannon Goggin:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. A pleasure to have you here. And so, Shannon, before we dive into Noyo and the work that you guys are doing to simplify and shed light on how we get our benefits. Talk to us about what inspires your work in health care.

Shannon Goggin:
What inspires our work is driving better consumer experiences for the people who are actually trying to use their health care. It’s notoriously difficult in the United States to understand what your health care is, what you have access to, what you’ll be expected to pay for, versus what your insurance might cover, what doctors you can see. And that all create a lot of fear and tension for people who are trying to go to the doctor themselves or help their family get the care that they need. And these are when you need to use your health care, it’s usually something else is going on. And so adding a layer of stress to that situation by having financial questions or administrative or what feels like bureaucratic issues really add to that stress and all the work that we do while it’s very much under the hood. And we’ll talk about where we focus on the stack and why. But it’s really driven by that. If we can solve these really knotty issues down deep in the roots, we can make it a better experience for everybody who’s trying to use their health care.

Saul Marquez:
It is difficult and it shouldn’t be. And so, Shannon, really, really fascinating. Talk to us about how exactly you guys are adding value to the ecosystem.

Shannon Goggin:
Noyo is the API layer for insurance distribution. What that means is we built all the infrastructure, all the tools that make it possible under the hood for software companies to connect with insurance companies and specifically software companies that are helping people understand their benefits coverage. Maybe they’re helping them shop for benefits, get different quotes about what plan options are available to them, and then get enrolled in those plans and then importantly, make sure that they know the status of their coverage. And the reason that this is important for health care is health insurance is really the gateway for people to use health care in this country. It’s very expensive if you don’t have health insurance to go to the doctor, get the care that you need. And everybody needs really great insurance coverage. But many people don’t have it. Not everybody has access to it in this country. And so the work we do is really let’s focus on making it possible for people to take any friction out of that process. Is it possible to get access to the health insurance that they need, which ultimately lets them get the health care that they need.

Saul Marquez:
Interesting. So there’s basically that point in time where people are deciding what insurance to get, how specifically to use their insurance, what coverage they have. It’s really that whole process. So you guys are helping aggregate data for other software companies, helping people to do what they do.

Shannon Goggin:
That’s right. We really facilitate the secure data exchange between health insurance companies and any software that their customers might want to use. So if you think about this in a financial services comparison in a sort of banking world, people can use Venmo to send money to their friends after they go to a meal together. And Venmo connects next to all the different banks and all the different financial institutions to make it possible for people to have that access, but there’s another company between Venmo and most of those banks, which facilitates the actual connections, the actual sort of infrastructure under the hood, that takes care of the security of saying who can have access to what account and make sure that it’s properly encrypted and protected and that the data is structured appropriately.

Shannon Goggin:
We play a similar role in the health insurance world, which is there are lots and lots of really amazing software products out there that are designed to help the consumer understand their coverage. So let me give you a few examples of when that might happen. You take a new job at a company and on your first day, you log into the payroll system to put your bank account information in so you can get paid. And you may also have that same experience to choose which medical plan do I want or which vision plan do I want? Who in my family should I sign up? Is it just me or I’m adding spouse, children, other dependents and go through that process at that moment where those software companies need to be able to talk to the insurance companies and say, hey, we’re adding somebody to this plan or we need to add up how much the deduction is going to be in our payroll system based on the plan that they chose. And so there’s a whole lot of information that’s needed in that moment, in that context.

Shannon Goggin:
And that’s a little different from another time. Someone may need access to their insurance information, which might be financial planning for the year. They may sit down. A family made it down and say, let’s budget out what we need to to set aside for this year as we do our financial plans. How much money can we contribute to our 401k? How much money should we be putting into our savings account? Things like that. And some of that input is the salaries that people are earning, the income that people are earning. Some of that might be, hey, I have a child who I’m expecting to need orthodontia this year. So I need to understand actually what my dental plan covers for them and what it doesn’t so I can set my financial goals appropriately. So we refer to this as the age of connected deterrence. As you mentioned at the beginning, what we really mean by that is people, consumers who are the ultimate customers of this insurance and who need to use it are going to need that information in different context, depending on what they’re trying to do. And it’s very, very difficult today for people to digest that information and understand it because it’s often not structured well. So it’s in an eighty-five page PDF or it’s that the answer to your question isn’t written down at all, and you would need to call the insurance company and spend a few hours kind of fighting your way through the customer service department to try to get the answer just very difficult, which makes it ultimately intimidating. And then often what we see in terms of health care outcomes is people are scared of their insurance or not confident what’s covered. They end up not using it, which is really not good for, you know, we want people to be going to the doctor proactively to be taking care of their vision and their dental that prevents bad outcomes down the line. And so it’s all very much interconnected. And what’s been amazing is there is a ton of investment. There are a lot of really exciting companies out there today that are building pretty beautiful consumer experiences around this and everything we do at Noyo is trying to give them the tools they need to build those that next generation of experiences for the consumers around their health insurance and their benefits.

Saul Marquez:
Love it. I really appreciate the clarification there, Shannon, and it’s sort of like the behind-the-scenes work that needs to happen that many of us as health consumers won’t ever see. It’s like that the magic behind Venmo, as you mentioned, as a great example. So how would you say what you guys do is different or better than what’s available out there?

Shannon Goggin:
Yeah, I’ll give you a specific example to walk through. It’s a little bit more tangible for people to wrap their heads around. So the way I actually got exposed to all of this was from my time as a product manager building one of these new modern HR software platforms and HRR benefits payroll system for small businesses to use. And we were building the software that I just described where on someone’s first day of work they come in, they would log into our software and choose between their plan options and get enrolled. And and so as a product manager, I was really fun, really motivating to build those experiences for that, because it was so far head and shoulders above what they’d been able to do previously by just having a lot of paperwork on their desk on that first day. So that was really exciting. And then the challenge for us as we grew and we were growing extremely quickly was why we now need to work with and exchange data with hundreds of different insurance companies. And if we take that specific example of adding a new hire to the company medical plan, it’s mostly paper-based in most of the industry.

Shannon Goggin:
And paper-based or there are some kind of legacy 1980s, 1990s-era custom coded files that it traded between these companies, so every week the software company or the broker might send a file to the insurance company, which says, hey, here’s everybody in the company who should be enrolled on coverage, and then the insurance company takes that file in and applies those changes to their system. But the challenge is those files are extremely costly to set up and they are one percent meaning when the company or the broker or the software is sending that file to the insurance company, they don’t get feedback that says, hey, there were ten people you asked us to enroll, but we had a problem with two of them. So we need your attention on it. The kind of feedback mechanism is it varies widely. It’s often, again, unstructured data, very difficult to pass and understand. And it takes a long time for that cycle to happen. And so what often happens is no one finds out that the person didn’t get enrolled in coverage properly until they’re at the doctor’s office. And by then, it’s a huge problem because, again, you’re in that moment as a patient. You’re in a moment of already stress and a need for care. And dealing with a billing issue or claims issue is the last thing on your mind when you’ve maybe broken your leg or you’ve just had a baby and you find out your coverage is there. It’s really scary. So everything that we do with our APIs and the systems that we’ve built is designed to solve for that visibility and transparency into what’s going on with everyone’s coverage at any point in time. And we have built programmatic checks and automation into our system to catch anything looks funky before it ever gets to the doctor’s office or that point of care.

Saul Marquez:
Fascinating. It is the brain that makes everything work and it’s what you expect from any consumer product out there. But when you get to the the realm of health insurance, it’s almost like expectations fall and you’re like, oh, here we go again, lift up the phone. And so love the the opportunity that you guys are creating to make our experience with these products a lot easier and frictionless. As you think about ways that you’ve improve outcomes or made business better, I’d love to hear an example from you of maybe one that stands out.

Shannon Goggin:
We actually did a study with one of our insurance companies that we work with, and it was pretty rigorous, looked at any policies, insurance policies, or people’s coverage that was managed through Noyo compared to manage the the old ways and looked at. So one of the big findings was people at the insurance company also have to staff up to take those will keep with that example of the new hires getting added to coverage or somebody adding a new child or moving addresses. Any of these changes to the policy that they’re covered by, people at the software platform or the broker have to spend a lot of time making changes when no, he was not involved, but also so do people at the insurance companies. Whole teams that are dedicated to receiving those files or that paperwork and processing it. And so part of the study that we did found that when the insurance companies were managing their clients through Noyo, they are spending eighty five percent less time on those groups at all because so much of what we do automated for them and handsfree. And the second part that was huge leap forward was they were finding far fewer issues, meaning we are looking all the time to see, hey, the company thinks they’ve got fifty people enrolled in coverage.

Shannon Goggin:
Does the insurance company also think that those same fifty people are enrolled in coverage? And often when we connect to a group onto Noyo, when we connect sort of a policy on to Noyo, we do an initial scan to see, hey, this company has had insurance for three years with this carrier. Let’s see if things are in shape. Let’s kind of get a pulse. They think fifty billion rolled doesn’t carry often. We find any time we connect a group that’s kind of been around for a while on the old ways, instantly sort of surface. All right, we’ve got three people who one side thinks it’s covered in the other side doesn’t or a bunch of addresses that are out of sync. We just sort of surface in this initial audit all the things that are that are out of sync and then we clean it up. And one of the other findings that was really great from the study was far fewer issues of data falling out of sync. And then any time we surfaced an issue was very proactive. And because of the way that we surface the issues, because of the sort of data that we pulled together for them, they’re able to resolve them in half the time than they would otherwise of trying to wade through and find paper trails and birds and things like that. So really great in terms of efficiency and just coverage confidence. Right? When people think they’re covered, they can feel confident in that. We sort of have this watchful eye out all the time for anything that looks awful. Catch it right away and. Get it resolved very quickly.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic and a great example of getting better and helping players get better at really boosting the confidence of coverage, as as you said, as you think about the setbacks. Shannon, I feel like we we learn more from our setbacks than our actual wins. What setback would you point to as pivotal to your learning? And that’s made you guys better as a result?

Shannon Goggin:
That’s a great question. And I fully agree with you that when you make a much better product, you make much faster strides when you uncover those barriers more quickly and then you can you can address them. So one of the sort of macro things that’s going on that we’ve kind of touched on in our conversation, but not that explicitly yet, is insurance has been around for a while, a lot longer than APIs. And there are a lot of systems and processes that are built on 40, 50, 60 years of doing things. And there’s a lot of inertia that comes with that. And so part of what we’re we’re working with our partners to do is get them to figure out a path from where they are today to where they really want to be. And most insurance companies are thinking about APIs, but most of them haven’t been able to make that full investment yet or haven’t completed their API journey. It’s not that API’s are pretty common thing that people talk about, but it’s you know, you build one API and solve all of your all of your problems. You would need an API or an API, I should explain, is a way for two different systems to speak to each other in a consistent language and to get an insurance company to the place where we can enable all of these special things that Noyo does, all of these real time data updates, granular access and controls. We work with them quite closely to say, hey, what does your what are your current capabilities? What are your systems do today? We don’t expect the insurance companies to have APIs that we can work with. We will partner with them very closely to identify, hey, what what’s the best way to get this thing done today? And then Noyo’s technology will bolster that and fill in any gaps. And we get creative with our partners about the right way to do these things together. So it’s very scalable. And so when you ask about setbacks, I think it’s it typically is these are very, very complex systems. And when we have worked more closely with carriers to say sometimes we’ll find post in the scoping process, say, OK, there’s another layer here that we’ll need to address. And so that would add time to the way that we would build the integration or the sort of the full scope of things that we can support from day one.

Shannon Goggin:
But we take a very partnership approach and we do this. And I think our best outcomes are where we have really tight relationship with those carrier teams, both their business teams, but also their engineering teams to say we want to find the lowest friction way to get the best possible outcome for our shared partners on the other side, Right. the consumers who are trying to use ultimately the software that’s built on these APIs. And so so we spend a lot of time. And one of the things that we’ve learned from that is we just spent a lot more time scoping and in great detail throughout the process. And that’s led to a much, much smoother and faster deployments.

Saul Marquez:
That’s great, Shannon. And it’s that measure twice, once idea, right?

Shannon Goggin:
That’s right. And because you really can’t I mean, you can’t go to you can’t be too careful with someone’s health care data and security and compliance is built-in from day one. And where we’ve seen companies be hesitant about this because previous experiences they’ve had trying to do this, they’ve seen stumbling blocks about those issues in those items. And so that’s something that we’ve built in from day one to our system, because if you can’t get it wrong with this type of data.

Saul Marquez:
That’s for sure. And actually, when you and I, Shannon, we’re getting ready for the podcast, you did the same thing. And I think it’s built-in your process. But you were asking me some thorough questions about our listeners and just dialing in so. Well, I think it’s a practice that spills over to other areas. And I give you kudos for that.

Shannon Goggin:
It’s always good to be well-aligned.

Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. That alignment is critical. And so with the proper alignment and a vision for what the health care experience and really benefits administration experience could be, what are you most excited about today?

Shannon Goggin:
This is where it gets fun. Yeah, I mean, that vision part, it’s I think so much is on the horizon for this industry. For the past several years, there have been a lot of early drivers, a lot of early movers at both the insurance companies and at these software platforms who are pushing, challenging the way things have been, advocating internally to say, hey, we really need to figure out how we’re going to work with this technology landscape. How are we going to make our consumers happier if the insurance has a pretty notorious low consumer score? And I get a lot of joy out of working with those people at our clients and in the industry at large who share that vision for thinking about these things from the consumer’s experience first and driving their organizations and pushing for change in very large organizations that take time to to change and update and all that. But there’s tremendous energy around this, a lot of investment, certainly venture investment on the software and technology side of things, but within the insurance companies as well. And what I’m excited about is sort of twofold.

Shannon Goggin:
One is all the activity and enthusiasm for this, the number of people who come to us and say we love the Noyo experience for this part of part of the stack, how can we put the new touch on this other piece? And they’re all interconnected and they’re all driving forward together. So that is certainly really exciting. And then I think the other part is just what we can unlock and the experiences we can enable by solving this really core under the hood infrastructure part that Noyo focuses on it just gets bigger every every day. And I’m personally excited about it because it’s a problem that it touches everyone. Insurance is a financial instrument. It’s the support that you need to feel confident to, you know, take a new role or start a business or have a family. You need to know that you can be protected and covered. And so I feel that the connection between the work we do every day and what’s possible for improving that experience going forward.

Saul Marquez:
Now that it’s really exciting and it’s great to know that companies like yours Shannon, Noyo, is making you guys are making the necessary moves and building the necessary APIs and infrastructure to give a more frictionless experience for health care consumers. So that’s fantastic. And thinking about it from an employer perspective, you want your people to be productive. You want them to access their health care. You want them to be preventative, as you mentioned at the beginning of our podcast interview. And having the data when you need it is key. So, Shannon, this has been a really interesting discussion. I love if you could just take us home with the closing thought and then the place where listeners could engage with you and and learn more about your company.

Shannon Goggin:
I think my closing thought is and now you’ve got me all excited Saul from our what’s what’s exciting for me right now is I love it when I hear people challenging the way things have been done to date because often that comes from inertia. You know, we do things the way we do them. But if you really start to dig into why you often find things that have well, that was sort of built on an assumption from 10 years ago. And let’s evaluate what things have changed. So I get really excited. And I would encourage any of your listeners who are thinking about the space or wondering how they can contribute is think about a consumer experience that your work touches and try to dissect why you think things might be the way they are and challenge the fundamental assumptions that those processes or ways of doing things might be built on. That’s where you can find a lot of the new opportunity to make dramatic improvements instead of incremental ones. So that that’s sort of something that I always encourage people to think about. And and certainly when I have the most fun working with our clients and our partners. And then where people can find me. Two places. We are on Twitter at NoyoHQ. That is the company handle. And then me personally, I am @ShannonCGoggin.

Saul Marquez:
I love it, Shannon. Just phenomenal work and really appreciate the work that you and your team is doing to improve access to care and really the whole process as it relates to how we work with our insurance companies. Thanks for sharing all you do with us.

Shannon Goggin:
Thank you. And if anyone listening today is excited about this and wants to talk more, you can also email future@noyo.com to meet with anyone who’s interested in connecting.

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