How many point solutions does one health plan need?

For brokers and benefits leaders

Point solutions can patch gaps. They cannot repair a health plan whose coverage and incentives were designed separately from care.

Employers have spent years adding solutions to compensate for what their health plans do not provide. Many do their individual job well. None of them address the gaps that exist by design.

Point solutions are evidence that the health plan underneath them is not doing enough. The answer is to redesign the underlying model, not build a better technology layer over its gaps.

A symptom

Specialized point solutions made sense as a starting point for addressing leaner health plans. Many of them add deeper value than a generalized plan ever could. One vendor helps members navigate care. Another manages diabetes. Others address behavioral health, musculoskeletal conditions, weight management, or prescription costs. For years, adding one more solved a real, immediate problem.

Yet employers are still facing rising costs, frustrated employees, and an expanding vendor stack. Seventy-five percent of organizations now manage four or more digital health vendors, at an estimated median annual cost of $580,000. Nearly three-quarters of brokers say their clients are consolidating vendors or considering it.

Consolidation may ease some of the administrative burden. A single platform may make benefits easier to find. Neither fixes the reason employers needed so many additional solutions in the first place. And accountability for coordination across solutions often falls to members, and to the employers and brokers expected to offer more next year.

The point-solution stack is a symptom. The health plan underneath it is the problem.

75%

The share of organizations now managing four or more digital health point solutions, at a median cost of $580,000 a year, just to keep the vendor stack running.

Source: Solera Health, 2026 survey of senior benefits leaders. Convergent finding: Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers, 2026 survey of benefits brokers and executives, brokers report clients use three to four point solutions on average, and nearly three in four are actively consolidating or considering it.

A new design

Built as one system from the start.

Bundling more point solutions under a single vendor or login doesn’t remove fragmentation. Individual solutions, even when offered together through a streamlined interface, have little reason – and even less ability – to account for what happens outside their platform. Real integration means that care, coverage, and support are designed to inform and enable one another.

Harbor Health starts from that design. Physicians built the model around more than 50 specialized condition journeys that follow a person through their care, connected to coverage and support from day one rather than assembled around them later.

Keeping care, coverage, and support connected means fewer opportunities for accountability to be displaced. Harbor Health is built around the potential of this approach. Fewer handoffs by design means members don’t have to determine which aspects of their health might impact others, and they aren’t left to coordinate care alone when they do.

The system shouldn’t treat a person’s health as a set of individual problems, because they are rarely separate.

A system that supports momentum toward health must be built with continuity at its core.

What comes next

A new renewal conversation.

Brokers are often the first to hear about fragmentation. Client complaints, frustrated calls, and more difficult renewals are all symptoms of a system that lacks continuity and accountability. Instead of evaluating the next point solution on its own, ask whether the whole plan is designed to work as one.

• Does this solve a real gap in care, or patch one that the system itself created?
• If a member fails to follow through on care, whose job is it to notice?
• Are care, coverage, and support pulling in the same direction, or each optimizing on its own?
• What does connecting so many vendors actually cost beyond each individual invoice?
• Could you explain your plan in one sentence? Can a member?

  
  

More point solutions will continue to solve individual problems well. But they won’t fix the system that created those problems in the first place. The next generation of health plans will connect specialist-level care, coverage, and support by design, so members aren’t left to piece it together themselves.

Learn more about the model

Visit HarborHealth.com.

Talk to Harbor

Phone: (844) 504-1100

Email: Brokers@HarborHealth.com