From 43% to 90%: How HealthEZ made Access to Care a promise it could keep

About

HealthEZ is a third-party health insurance administrator that builds self-funded health plans for employer groups across the United States. Every client effectively self insures, selecting their own provider network, pharmacy benefit manager, and a menu of cost containment programs. With no two groups configured the same way, and hundreds of clients on the books, getting implementation right is not a process problem. It is a delivery promise.

April leads HealthEZ's client implementation function with one mandate above all others: no surprises. Her team is the face of HealthEZ to every new client, responsible for making sure each group understands exactly what they have purchased and what is coming next. When the tools they were working with started undermining that promise, April and her team evaluated 26 platforms before landing on Rocketlane, bringing project delivery, client experience, and operational visibility into one place.

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The Roadblocks Before Rocketlane

‍HealthEZ's business model is built around a highly configurable product. Every client picks from a menu of networks, programs, and services, and those choices interact in different ways depending on what has been selected. April has never calculated the exact number of permutations, but puts it plainly: thousands. Managing that across hundreds of clients, with a lean team and a busy season that brings roughly ten times the normal volume, meant the operation was running on institutional knowledge and would be unable to operate effectively at scale.
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A 750-step process that required expert knowledge to operate

Every new engagement began with all ~750 project steps loaded onto the plan. Someone then had to work through that list manually, deciding which steps applied based on what the client had purchased, and carrying the workflow rules for every cross-functional team in their head. It was slow, error-prone, and entirely the wrong use of an implementation manager's time. As April put it, the people hired for their ability to get in front of clients and explain complex things are not necessarily the same people who should be manually configuring complex project plans from scratch.

Clients with no way to track their own onboarding

‍Every status update, every document request, every milestone notification happened over email. Clients had no way to check where their onboarding stood without contacting the team directly, and getting information in writing took time. There was no consistency: different implementation managers communicated differently, and clients had no single place to go. Getting the process and the client out of email was a problem the team had no answer for.

Three months of manual work to understand a single year

‍In her first year at HealthEZ, April needed to understand how implementations had tracked against the team's core commitments. There was no dashboard, no report she could pull. So she reviewed every project in the portfolio manually, one by one, marking milestones, recording dates, building a picture from scratch.

"It's all I did for three months. And I never wanted to do it again."

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The Transformation with Rocketlane

HealthEZ ran a structured evaluation of 26 platforms before selecting Rocketlane. The decision came down primarily to one thing: the client portal. Automation mattered, and their previous tool lacked the flexibility to support it, but automation capability exists in many platforms.

"The portal stood out. The portal was such a game changer, and there's nothing like it in our industry. We are first to it."

‍Rules encoded once, project plans that come out right every time

Before Rocketlane, someone had to carry the logic for every cross-functional team's workflow in their head and manually strip the 750-step plan down to what actually applied for each client. Now, HealthEZ has encoded those rules directly into Rocketlane's conditional logic engine. During the planning phase, the team works through a plan design guide with the client, capturing every configuration choice in the platform. Once that phase closes, Rocketlane generates the project plan automatically, with only the relevant steps surfaced, in the right sequence, for the right teams. Back-end teams stop asking which task to work on. They start working.

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A portal that replaced email, PDF forms, and manual follow-up

Before Rocketlane, HealthEZ kicked off every new client with an email full of PDF attachments to be filled in, printed, signed, and scanned back. Now, clients log into a branded portal and submit forms, upload documents, and track their own progress, without touching a single project task. The portal surfaces roughly ten parallel workstreams per client, shows progress across each one, and includes prompts telling clients exactly what they can do to move things faster. Every implementation manager shows the client the same interface, with the same expectations, creating consistency that was difficult to achieve over email.

"We have set it up so that it feels like: we know exactly what you're doing, it looks like this, this is all you have to do."

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A broker portal that became a competitive advantage

Brokers are central to how HealthEZ acquires business, and they often manage multiple employer clients at once. HealthEZ worked with Rocketlane to build a dedicated multi client broker portal, something the team specifically requested and that no off-the-shelf tool had been able to give them. Brokers log in and toggle between all their clients in one place, with full visibility into each implementation. The commercial effect has been tangible: at a meeting with 35 brokers after the most recent January 1st peak (the busiest ever experienced by HealthEZ), HealthEZ's CEO noted he had not received a single complaint call during busy season. In prior years, those calls had been routine.

"It is in many ways a market maker. A broker could place all  their business at HealthEZ, and see exactly who they’re working with, and what they’re working on. It's all in one spot."

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Reporting that surfaces the six projects that need attention, not the 200 that don't

In April's first year, understanding implementation health meant manually reviewing every project in the portfolio, one by one, for three months. With milestones and completion dates now captured directly in Rocketlane as work happens, April can pull a single report and immediately see which projects have gaps. The team stops sorting through noise and focuses on what actually needs intervention. That shift, from manual data collection to exception-based management, changed what April's job looks like entirely.

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Access to Care: the metric that measures everything

At HealthEZ, success is measured above all else by whether a new member can walk into a doctor's office, fill a prescription, and confirm their coverage on day one of their plan. That metric, Access to Care, is the composite of five or six underlying milestones that have to land correctly across every cross-functional team in the delivery chain. In April's first year, that rate sat at approximately 43%. After implementing Rocketlane and standardising delivery across the team, it reached 90% at the most recent January 1st peak, when 204* active projects were running concurrently. Critically, every deliverable in HealthEZ's control was met on time. 

"100% of the things that we had, we were able to deliver on. It's driven so much efficiency and good teamwork across our organisation."

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What's Next for HealthEZ

The delivery model is standardised and the client experience is a differentiator. The next frontier is intelligence. April is building toward a future where documents that cross functional teams currently produce by hand are generated automatically, using the configuration data already captured in Rocketlane during the plan design phase. While the tasks are nuanced and complex, the logic is straightforward: if the platform can build the project plan, it should be able to build the document too. Rocketlane's Nitro, its AI layer, is where that ambition lives.

When Rocketlane's team walked April through Nitro's document agent and AI analyst capabilities on the call, her response was immediate. She asked to bring in the team member who leads document creation to see it firsthand. The ambition is not to reduce headcount. It is to change what the team spends its time on, moving people from execution to judgment, from creating documents to asking whether they actually serve the member on the other end.

"I want to use AI to supplement the work on the backend, not to take away jobs, but to up level jobs to be more thought provoking. We are scaling fast enough to keep up with it. Why not?"