The Business of Benefits: Enhanced maternity benefits at Koch Industries

Here’s this week’s edition of our Business of Benefits series, where we spotlight benefits that are driving value for HR leaders, digging into their design and ROI.

If you’re interested in talking about a workplace benefit you love for an upcoming edition, click here to get in touch. You can also reach out directly to HR Brew’s total rewards reporter, Courtney Vinopal: [email protected]

Koch Industries employs 60,000 workers across the US, and most are “around that age range where people are growing their families,” between about 30 and 40 years old, according to Courtney Goershel, a senior benefits analyst with the conglomerate.

After noticing high rates of neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions and cesarean deliveries among its health plan members, Koch decided to partner with Pomelo, a point solution focused in part on virtual maternity care. Since 2022, all employees enrolled in Koch’s medical plan have had access to Pomelo, and more than 3,000 of these employees and their family members have enrolled.

The result? NICU admissions decreased by 8% among participants, while the length of NICU stays went down by 31%, according to figures shared by Koch and Pomelo. Cesarean deliveries also decreased by 7%.

Encouraged by these results, Koch recently started to expand its Pomelo benefit to include in-person doula support, as well as menopause care. Goershel told us more about the partnership.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Explain the business case for this benefit.

When we’re looking at adding on various benefits to our ecosystem, we go to the data. We partner with Artemis, which is our data warehouse, and we look to see where there’s opportunities or gaps in care within our population.

One of the gaps in care was maternal health, especially when we were looking at some of the social determinants of health. We were seeing high NICU lengths of stay, and just high NICU admissions in general, and then also an increase in our cesarean deliveries. We knew that those were three data points that we wanted to improve on.

Ultimately it came down to a few [partners], and Pomelo was the leading one. […] They really look at the person and understand their previous health history, what they’re currently going through, and where they want to get to as it relates to maternity care or postpartum. So we really appreciated that.

The top priority for us is member care…making sure they’re providing quality care. But then, of course, to drive down some of those high cost claims that we were seeing as it related, especially, to some of those different NICU admissions.

What level of investment does this benefit represent for your organization?

We’re not able to share numbers publicly. But what I will say is that we continue to see the return-on-investment with Pomelo, which is why we continue to expand our partnership with them.

How are you measuring the ROI of this benefit?

We are seeing the reduction in the length of NICU stays. We’re also seeing a reduction in NICU admissions, a reduction in cesarean deliveries. We do see that a lot of the patients that are working with Pomelo also are being prescribed aspirin to help with their high blood pressure, which we, in turn, think that is reducing and helping some of the reduction in our ER visits, as well, for pre-eclampsia.

It is a virtual program, and a lot of our employees and [health plan] members live in rural areas. So not only are they getting access to the care, but then they’re also getting access to quality clinicians.

We’re always open to feedback, and we communicate that to our employees. We have a benefits newsletter…and on that newsletter, there is a section where employees can submit a form sharing feedback that they have on our different partners or benefits that they’re engaging with. [...] We’ve received, honestly, very positive feedback about the Pomelo care program.