bbenewise. For trustees
Benewise · For fund trustees

Your members' benefits are excellent. Using them is the hard part.

Benewise is a navigation layer for the members you already cover — one place that reads all four layers of their coverage and answers, with receipts, the questions the fund office fields every day. Free to the member, forever.

Built for FDNY-side funds firstOn-device · PHI never leaves the phoneLive demo, not mockups
The problem

Four layers of coverage. Zero maps across them.

No carrier, fund office, PBM, or vendor tool sees all four.

So members guess — and every wrong guess is paid for twice.

The member pays

  • $100 at the urgent-care habit instead of $10 or $0
  • A denied scan nobody precertified
  • Fund benefits — dental, optical, drug — left unused

The fund pays

  • Higher-cost claims on its own drug book
  • Office hours spent re-explaining the same four layers
  • Savings the MLC mandate expects, unfound

Context trustees already know: the NYC Comptroller reports the Health Insurance Stabilization Fund's disposable balance was essentially depleted in FY 2024 — the cushion that used to absorb overruns is gone, and the MLC healthcare-savings mandate asks funds to find savings, not just administer benefits.

The member experience

Four questions every member asks. Tap through the answers.

These are screens from the working demo — the same build your members would install — with what each answer does for the fund underneath.

What the fund gets

Demo data — every person and claim is fictional. The live build is at benewise.health/demo.
How it works

Three laws, not features.

On-device by architecture.

Plan papers are read and answered on the member's phone. No PHI leaves the device — there is no Benewise server holding member health data to breach, subpoena, or sell.

Deterministic math, receipts shown.

Every dollar figure comes from a verified calculation engine reading published plan documents — never from a language model's guess. Each answer cites its source on screen.

Non-transactional, no steering.

Benewise books nothing, enrolls nothing, and takes no payment from any pharmacy, provider, or vendor it surfaces. The member track is free, forever.

The consequence for trustees: your members' data stays theirs by architecture, not by policy promise — and every recommendation is auditable arithmetic.
The worked example

What navigation is worth — counted honestly, on two ledgers.

A welfare fund's own book is its drug, dental, and optical benefit. Site-of-care savings land on the City program's ledger — the one the MLC mandate holds funds answerable to — and in the member's pocket. This model keeps the ledgers separate, and every input is yours to change.

Default 26,000 — the FDNY-side anchor. Published plan values Illustrative — editable Assumption — editable
Members keep (copay differences, plan-published)
Fund's own book — drug benefit
City program ledger — the MLC frame
All ledgers, per year

Member copay deltas cite published NYCE PPO plan documents (Benewise extraction, 2026). Allowed-amount and ingredient-cost deltas are illustrative and editable — plan documents don't publish them; your fund's PBM and the City's data verify them at reconciliation, which is the point. Utilization rates are labeled assumptions.

The landscape

Everyone else sees one layer.

Who members have todayWhat it sees
Carrier portalThe plan's view of the planOne layer — its own claims and network. Nothing about the fund, PICA, or agency benefits.
Fund officeTrusted, and stretchedThe fund's benefits, in office hours — answering the same four-layer questions by phone.
PBM toolsThe drug layer onlyA price, not the move — no plan context, no fund-vs-PICA routing.
Employer-gated navigatorsSold to employers, not fundsThe employer is the customer. Nothing is built for a welfare fund's structure — or sold to one.
BenewiseBuilt for this structureThe only tool designed to cross all four layers — with a member track that is free, forever.

Category characterizations; the named, feature-by-feature grid is at the comparison page.

Who's behind it

Payer-side operators, member-side product.

Alex Wiggall, PharmDFounder

Senior payer-side executive who designs pharmacy, quality, and risk programs for a living — building, on the member's side, the navigator the industry never shipped.

Disclosed up front — governance register

Elisabeth HaydenCo-founder · Clinical navigation

Nursing background; leads the clinical navigation verticals — surgical and ambulatory-surgery episodes, and maternity — so the app's guidance matches how care actually unfolds.

Privacy-first engineeringEngineering pillar

Healthcare-data compliance and HIPAA-grade infrastructure background, building the on-device architecture that keeps member data on the member's phone.

The rollout

Prove it before it costs you anything.

PHASE 1 · NOW Free member launch

Benewise goes to your members free — no fund contract, no fund data, no fund cost. The fund sees a quarterly engagement report: activations, questions answered, documents covered.

PHASE 2 · WHEN PROVEN Founding-fund partnership

When engagement is real, the fund can fund it for members — at a founding rate locked for founding funds. No share of savings, ever: savings verification is the deliverable, not our revenue.

$2 PMPM founding rate10% of the fee held at risk against verified savingsQuarterly reconciliation vs. your own dataWalk-away terms

PHASE 3 · THE MANDATE Citywide, anchored to MLC savings

The same engine, offered where the savings mandate lives — with founding funds as the proof. Founding funds keep the founding rate.

Straight answers on the money

Six things trustees always ask. Answered before you ask them.

The founder rate

One flat founding rate — $2 per member per month, locked for founding funds, in writing. No tiers that creep, no per-feature upsells mid-contract. Early funds keep the founding rate as we scale.

No gainshare. On purpose.

No share of savings, ever. Calculating "attributable savings" is tedious and adversarial — it puts vendor math against fund math every quarter and taxes your staff to referee it. We charge a flat fee; the savings ledger is your deliverable, not our revenue. The only number at risk is 10% of our own fee.

Projected savings, done properly

We will not guess your book from the outside. Under a BAA and a data-sharing agreement, we model your population's actual claims and return a signed, assumption-by-assumption projection on your letterhead-ready terms. Without your data, we show the method — not made-up numbers.

Claims connectivity, priced honestly

Member-authorized claims connectivity (Flexpa) is a per-connection vendor cost, quoted separately at contract — never buried in the PMPM. And we say where it works today: Anthem and Cigna populations connect; original-Medicare retirees ride the CMS Blue Button; EmblemHealth and MetroPlus employer lines don't expose the data yet, and we tell you that up front.

Open enrollment, demystified

The first transfer period after the NYCE PPO transition is exactly when members get lost. Benewise turns the choice into plain English — what changes, what it costs, which fund benefits ride along — before the window closes, not after the regret letter arrives.

Configured to your population

Your fund's documents, your riders, your excess-spend concerns — drug-book pressure, out-of-network leakage, ER-instead-of-urgent-care — drive what the engine watches and what the member sees. This is configured per fund from your own papers, not a one-size template.

The ask

A letter of intent and a liaison.

A non-binding LOI — so we build your fund's documents in first — and one fund-office contact to verify we read them right. That's the whole ask. The member launch is free either way.

For emergencies, members are always told: call 911 — on every care screen, every time.