Nearly a year after ACA implementation, this session dove into the new ways benefits are being offered to consumers, how employers are buying care directly, and what new technologies are enabling change in direct care provision.

Ethan Prater examines how being a self insured employer actively and productively uses health care coverage to better understand the health care system.

Consumer engagement in health care decision making is more important than ever. Though clinical outcomes in the U.S. haven’t improved, the financial burden on individuals has substantially increased as health care costs continue to skyrocket.  What innovations today optimize consumer engagement, and which ones will emerge as the next new standards for health care management?

Join nationally-recognized health care and benefits experts from Forrester Research, business coalitions and employers as they discuss innovations in the new era of individual-driven health benefits.

How are Health 2.0 tools helping employers make smarter purchasing decisions? What technologies are vendors using to educate employers and help them when making benefit enrollment decisions? We’ll address these questions and more, and see the tools that companies are using.

Ethan Prater, VP Product Marketing, Castlight Health

Castlight integrates provider search with cost information to make consumers better shoppers. Aiming to lower health care costs and end discrimination against clients with pre-existing conditions, Castlelight was named #1 onThe Wall Street Journal’s list of “The Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies” for 2011. Here Ethan Prater discusses the technological ways Castlelight is working to achieve its goals.

To be on Launch! it must be the first time a company has demoed at a conference, and the product must either be coming out soon or have been in very limited beta to this point. During 2010 we saw some larger, better funded companies on Launch! but everyone’s had to compete to get on and there are some teeny startups here that you’ve never heard of that might just blow you away. It’s 10 continuous 4 minute demos, and the winner gets a mainstage spot the following year, not to mention bragging rights. Who wins? You decide.

Giovanni Colella, CEO, Castlight Health

Gio is primarily a psychiatrist trained in Milan, but he’s best known for founding RelayHealth and eventually selling it to McKesson. He co-founded Castlight in 2008, raised $80m in venture funds, and became publicly exposed in a NY Times article in August. You’ll see that they have great ambitions to change the shopping experience of American health care consumers and are already working with Safeway.

Ethan Prater, Castlight Health – Employers, Payers and the Great Health 2.0 Awakening

In 2010 Castlight Health was outed by the NY Times as being the engine behind Safeway’s ambitious attempts to change the health care experience of its employees. They were the runaway winner of Launch! at Health 2.0 in 2010 and the WSJ was soon calling them the #1 start-up in America. Since then Castlight’s integrated more government data from the Health Data Initiative and is rounding out its user-experience and client base among self-insured employers.  This demo was part of Employers, Payers and the Great Health 2.0 Awakening panel which Ethan’s boss Gio Collella was on at the 2011 Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Employers and insurers have been the sleeping giants of health care. But now they are increasingly active in guiding people they cover in wellness programs and in collaborating on the infrastructure for new delivery models. How are they using Health 2.0 as part of their awakening? This panel was part of the 2011 Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco.