Small Business Health Insurance | Sana Benefits

Sana MD: Your new advanced primary care provider

Emma Gilbert — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 13:03:00 +0000

Update: In June of 2023, the Sana MD primary care clinic evolved into Sana Primary Care, a best-in-class virtual primary care practice.

Sana is excited to announce we’ve partnered with Proactive MD, a national leader in offering comprehensive primary care, to open Sana MD, a new Advanced Primary Care health center in Austin, Texas.

Members on Sana’s PPO Plus plans will receive world-class primary care at no cost, with $0 copays for unlimited visits and services. Patients can visit their new primary care physician at Sana MD for routine annual physicals, acute care, complex chronic conditions, and everything in between.

Sana MD brings together several pieces of the healthcare system, making them more accessible and understandable for our members. The health center provides personalized, compassionate, and informative support when navigating the healthcare system.

Sana MD will open in January 2022.

Building a value-based primary care model is essential to improving health outcomes and reducing costs for employers and employees. By promoting a proactive and more in-depth relationship with a primary care physician, Sana MD emphasizes preventive care, chronic care monitoring and management, and wellness. This value-based primary care model is proven to deliver a better experience for patients and physicians alike.

Sana MD includes family medicine, urgent and preventive care, reduced-cost prescriptions through an in-house pharmacy, labs and diagnostics, chronic disease management, and total wellness solutions including weight loss programs, diabetes education, stress management, smoking cessation, and wellness coaching — all under one roof.

Members are paired with a Patient Advocate — a licensed social worker who’ll be a trusted advisor to help with referrals, second opinions, and even in-home check-ins.

Sana MD is breaking the mold of fee-for-service, rapid patient turnover primary care by providing:

Wait times less than 5 minutes
No-rush 30-minute appointment blocks
First-class service from a friendly and caring staff
Virtual visits with video appointments and in-app messaging
Patient Advocates paired with members to help guide them through their care journey

Sana provides high-quality, value-based health care to small businesses and their employees. Sana MD will be the foundation of our Sana Care ecosystem in Austin, and we aim to expand our Advanced Primary Care services to more locations in the future.

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Sana: 2020 in review

Emma Gilbert — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 07:53:00 +0000

While we’ll remember 2020 as especially tumultuous and challenging, we are going back one last time at the year everyone can’t wait to put behind them. Sana is looking very different than it did a year ago, so we wanted to share what happened over the last 365 days to get us to where we are now.

Our team

Sana is serving thousands more small business employees than we did a year ago, and we’ve had to quickly expand our team to do so. We’ve grown from 40 to 98 employees in just one year, exceeding our wildest expectations. We’ve seen extensive growth in our provider, product, marketing, sales, underwriting, and operations teams.

Our customer success team more than doubled over the last year, allowing us to continue to provide personalized support to all of our benefits admins. Our member advocate team has also grown from 5 to 21 so that we can continue efficiently responding to questions while keeping our NPS above 40 as our membership doubled.

Sana entered 2020 operating only in Texas, but we were excited to expand into Kentucky in April and Illinois in September, respectively. We’ve since begun working with small businesses in each state. Both states are lacking in health insurance options outside of their respective monopolies, so we plan to continue to offer more affordable and accessible care to those businesses that need it the most. Sana will continue expanding into several more states underserved by traditional health insurance carriers in 2021.

Responding to the circumstances of 2020

The story of 2020 was COVID-19 and it’s important to know you’re covered when a pandemic is sweeping across the globe. Sana was quick to jump in to make sure our members were taken care of, making all COVID-19 related treatments, diagnostic tests, antibody tests, and vaccines 100% free for all Sana members. That coverage is still in effect now and will be for the foreseeable future.

In June, as the country witnessed the tragic killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed, Sana sought input from our employees on how we could begin to be a part of the solution to the racism plaguing our country. As a company, Sana committed to:

Establishing Juneteenth and Election Day as holidays
Encouraging employees to take PTO to protest and volunteer
Hiring all management positions according to the Rooney Rule
Not participating in panels that lack women or minority panelists
Matching employee donations to NAACP, Black Girls Code, the ACLU, and Campaign Zero up to $10,000 total
Matching additional non-profit donations up to $250 annually per employee
Requiring bias training for all hiring managers
Creating a budget for future D&I initiatives

Company news

On September 9, we announced that Sana had raised a $20.8 Series A funding round. This funding will allow Sana to enter new markets, improve our offerings, and continue to grow our team to keep up with demand.

In October, Sana rolled out new all-access health plans with more options for deductibles and coinsurance, while still keeping our policy of no out-of-network restrictions. By going from five to nine plans, we’re able to give small businesses more flexibility in what they offer to employees.

Delivering on our promise

Sana’s mission is to make healthcare understandable, accessible, and affordable. Value-based care is the best way to reduce costs while improving patient outcomes, and we partnered with several organizations that make that a reality for our members.

Edison Healthcare is providing our members with Centers of Excellence for surgery, while Connect DME and Green Imaging are equipping patients with low or no-cost medical devices and imaging, respectively.

We’ve brought on SmithRx as our new transparent Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM). Unlike traditional PBMs, which often keep drug discounts and rebates for themselves, transparent PBMs like SmithRx pass them on to the member. With pharmaceuticals costs increasing rapidly under traditional PBMs, offering SmithRx to our members will go a long way towards lowering their healthcare costs.

Customer experience

While Sana has a culture of remote work built-in, we know working from home was a difficult change for many in 2020. We spend a lot of time working with human resources professionals, so as a way to give them a break we hosted multiple ‘Treat Yo Self’ virtual events. The events included yoga and meditation, and we even sent attendees ingredients so they could make a cocktail with our guest mixologist.

We’ve also made several updates to our website to improve the member and admin experience, including:

Easier document signing and onboarding: We’ve automated the documents required to get your company set up with Sana, so it’s even easier to review, sign, and get back to business.

Improved ‘Find a Doctor’ search: Members can see high-quality medical partners and perks in search results with info about how to access each, and quickly search popular specialties with a single click.

Request a provider: Members can easily request their preferred provider or facility right from their account.

Enroll in Life and Disability Coverage: If Life and Disability are offered by an employer, members can now enroll online in our easy enrollment flow.

Looking forward

That was an eventful 2020. While we’re all happy to see it in our rearview mirror, we’re even more excited about the year to come. Sana is committed to initiatives that will give members low-cost, high-quality care in 2021, and we’ll continue to bring in partners that will support that mission. You can also expect to see more exciting product updates on our website

We’re excited to expand into more states and meet more small businesses that are looking for a new solution to rising healthcare costs. Sana is ready to make 2021 the best year yet!

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ClassPass adapts fitness offerings for a remote world

sanabenefits — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 17:20:00 +0000

Employers have been challenged with adapting their benefits to support a remote workforce, especially when it comes to boosting employee health, wellbeing, and morale.

But while many employees are struggling to stay active and physically well amid the pandemic, employers can adapt their physical wellness benefits for a virtual world.

For Sana Benefits, a health benefits provider, this meant evolving a benefit they were already offering employees through ClassPass, a subscription-based provider of fitness classes they’ve been utilizing since 2018…

LinkedIn’s 50 Best Startups To Work For In 2020

sanabenefits — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 18:11:00 +0000

44. Sana Benefits (Insurance)

What you should know: Sana Benefits offers self-financed health insurance plans that are geared toward small businesses. With self-financed health plans, employers pay for the health care their employees use (versus a flat rate), potentially saving money. Sana has also teamed up with…

Austin startup Sana Benefits raises $20.8M to continue growth

sanabenefits — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:23:00 +0000

Austin-based Sana Benefits, which provides self-funded health insurance to small businesses, has raised $20.8 million to expand its business.

The round was led by Austin-based Gigafund. Additional investors included Trust Ventures and….

Read more at the Austin American-Statesman.

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Rolling up the latest in startup health insurance offerings, Sana Benefits raises $20.8 million

sanabenefits — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:25:00 +0000

Sana Benefits, a manager of self-funded insurance plans for small businesses, said it has raised $20.8 million in a recent round of funding as it looks to roll up all of the latest startup health benefit providers into a convenient package for small businesses..

Remote from Day 1: The Sana Benefits Culture That Has Served Employees and Customers Alike

sanabenefits — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 17:28:00 +0000

In early March, as the coronavirus rapidly locked down the U.S. economy, Sana Benefits joined thousands of other companies in shutting down its Texas headquarters for the time being.

Sana, which provides small and medium-sized businesses with self insurance health plans for their employees, closed the office on March 5. Thankfully, the three-year-old startup had…..

Sana Benefits is Disrupting the Healthcare Insurance Industry in Texas

sanabenefits — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 17:29:00 +0000

Sana Benefits moved to Austin a year ago from the San Francisco Bay area with a focus on disrupting the insurance industry and providing healthcare coverage for small to medium-sized businesses.

“We had this idea for how to fix small business health insurance and the barriers to starting it California were really high,” said Will Young…

Sana Benefits gets $6.3 million to disrupt ‘Stone Age’ health care insurance industry

sanabenefits — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:31:00 +0000

The company joins a raft of upstarts remaking a notoriously inefficient health care system. These startups include players like Oscar Health, Clover, and Bright Health — all of which have raised hundreds of millions to billions of dollars over the last few..