We’ve been explaining and exploring health and benefits since early this year through the Paytient Podcast, but we haven’t really touched on ancillary benefits — until now.
Alex Frommeyer is the co-founder and CEO of Beam Benefits, an insurance and employee benefits business that provides full dental, vision, life, disability, and supplemental health coverage for employers of all sizes. Beam started out as an IoT company in the dental space (it was known as Beam Dental), but it expanded earlier this year to offer more comprehensive coverage.
Here are a few highlights from our conversation with Alex Frommeyer (“Fro” for short):
How he first got involved in benefits and dental health:
“I'm actually an engineer by training — both of my co-founders at Beam are engineers by training — so we got into the industry through family members. … We were just inspired early on in our careers to focus on this tiny kind of forgotten corner of healthcare called dentistry because we saw a lot of the same problems that exist in healthcare that are being tackled by digital health companies far and wide to also be true of the dental industry as well. If the joke is that healthcare care is 10 years behind everything else, dentistry is 10 years behind healthcare, so it needs even more help kind of catching up to the 21st century.”
Helping everyone realize that benefits are meant to be used
“What we see is such a clear opportunity to communicate through the very products that we offer and the experience that we craft this idea that, yes, the benefits are meant to be used. For your employees to really value what they're getting in the benefits package, at least some of the products need to be consumable and gamified and a real user experience that you interact with. … We try to just think holistically about what's really going to create that delight and that appreciation from the employer and the employee relationship. As long as that's true, Beam will be a very valuable piece of how an employer thinks about their experience for their team and for their company.”
How Beam encourages preventive care
“We are literally giving our members a high-quality, connected electric toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, and replacement heads for the brush. Those products are obviously meant to be used and they communicate how much we care about our members' preventive care. And so when it comes time to go get a checkup at a dentist for the purposes of extending that preventive care now with professional help, that makes a lot of sense to a member. Because they’re like, ‘Of course Beam wants me to get my checkups at the dentist and they want me to have a great home oral care experience as well. Why else would they be doing what they're doing as a business unless they cared about those things?’”
The power of a physical presence in members’ lives
“We want you to use and interact with Beam literally every day, multiple times a day. That's why we're putting the brush in your hand. It’s going to sit on your sink. It’s going to remind you that your employer cares about you so much that they selected Beam over the other options available in the market. And they are showing how much they care about you as an employee with physical products and something that you can literally leverage every day.”
Listen to the full discussion via the podcast player below or by clicking this link. To learn more about Alex Frommeyer and Beam Benefits, connect with them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or at BeamBenefits.com.
