Inside the Industry: AgencyBloc + HealthSherpa: Transforming Medicare Enrollment
Inside the Industry is a monthly video podcast hosted by AgencyBloc to take an insider's look at the health, group benefits, and senior insurance industry. Learn more about what's happening right now, what it means for your agency, and how your team can stay ahead of these changes.
Transcript for the Episode
Note: CS denotes Cory Schmidt, KA denotes Korey Ashton, and SS denotes Scott Sanchez
Cory Schmidt: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Inside the Industry podcast. I am Cory Schmidt, Co-Founder of AgencyBloc, and I'm going be your host today. I'm super excited to have two awesome people on the podcast. We have Korey Ashton, VP of Medicare at HealthSherpa, and Scott Sanchez, CPO at AgencyBloc. Welcome to the podcast.
Korey Ashton: Hey, thanks for having me. This is super fun. We're really excited to be partnering with you guys.
Scott Sanchez: Thank you, Cory and Korey. I guess I'm the only one that isn't Cory/Korey I can be Cory/Korey for today if you want, but no seriously, Korey Ashton, thank you for joining us. We're thrilled to talk.
CS: Glad you guys are able to make time to do this. I know there's a lot of really cool work that's happening. We may have shared some of this at BlocBuilder this year, but wanted to have you guys on the podcast because we recently announced that AgencyBloc is going to be integrating with HealthSherpa for Medicare. Obviously lots of customers excited about this. And so just wanted to spend time with the two of you for a bit, just to learn about like, you know, what the solutions are, why the integration, why now? Why should customers care about this? And really just kind of peel back the layers a little bit.
Maybe to start with, just to ground the audience, we did announce at our BlocBuilder Conference earlier this year, that we will be integrating with HealthSherpa for Medicare, which is super exciting. Korey had some of her team members at the conference and I will say every time I walked by the booth, Korey, they were overwhelmed with people asking questions and learning about the product. Yeah. So it sounds like you, heard that as well from Eric and Catherine.
KA: Yes. They came back and said they felt like resident celebrities. So you totally made their day. Catherine had literally just started. So it was a great welcome to the company experience for her.
CS: Love it.
SS: They really were celebrities because they kept seeing agencies come up to them and say, hey, what about this? And what about this? And I'm so excited and whatnot. Like they have a little bit of a following there.
KA: Yeah, it went straight to their head. They both came back, you know, wanted their faces to be on billboards. No, it was great though.
SS: We can do all we can work on that.
CS: I love that they got immersed into the passion and level of interest that our customers have in the industry and how they just want to solve problems and move faster and work with more customers and serve more customers. So in that realm, I guess let's jump into it. I want to talk to you guys about what was the driving force behind why we want to do this partnership, why we're building an integration and what we're hoping that our customers can gain from it.
So maybe let's start from, I always think about the customers living in AMS+ because that's the world that I grew up in and helped build out, but tell us, Scott, why is this valuable and why now?
SS: Well, Cory, I'd say a couple of things. I agree. I think of them staying in AMS+, right? Their agency management system where their client information is, all the information about them, which is great. And that really is their home base for serving their clients, answering questions and other things. But the reality is there are other tools that they absolutely have to use as well. And so when we think about it, one of those key sets of tools is quoting and enrollment integrations, right?
AMS+ doesn't handle things like quoting plans, right? Or enrolling clients in that. The way we think about it is we connect with various players who actually do that for us. And so our goal in many ways is to connect with the most important quoting and enrollment integrations, you know, whether that's Connecture or Sunfire or HealthSherpa, which we're super excited to talk about. And we really see our role as helping connect to those things, right? To those tools and creating a seamless experience, so that they can do what they need to do, maybe starting from AMS+, but really using these other tools as part of it. And look, at the end of the day, HealthSherpa has become one of the largest and most influential enrollment platforms, in ACA especially, and we'll talk about Medicare as well. Tens of thousands of agents, thousands of agencies that are using it and an increasing influence in Medicare. It just felt like a no-brainer. So we could connect AMS+ to the tools that they use. The tools that they want to use and streamline their experience for them.
CS: That's awesome. Maybe, Korey, on the other side of it, why, you know, to Scott's point, like we feel obviously we might be a little partial, Scott, but like we feel that it's really important to connect these tools into the agency management platforms. You know, why is this a big part of HealthSherpa's strategy and why?
KA: I'll speak to it just kind of as somebody who's been around for, this will be my 18th AEP this year, is that the amount of agents I have worked with over my time as a carrier rep and then, you know, now in the technology space, so many of them don't actually use an agency management system or they do and they're not using it as well as they should be, right? Like their data is not funneling over.
And so, these agents and agencies have no source of truth. And then when we have agencies who are looking to maybe retire or sell their businesses too, like they don't have great client records. So I've been an advocate for a very long time as just somebody who's been around is you should own your records and you should have clean data and you cannot rely on a coding and enrollment platform to do that for you.
And I actually correct people when they're like, yeah, you we love HealthSherpa, it's like a built-in CRM. And I'm like, well, back it up, right? I obviously think our platform is great. I think the technology that we have is wonderful, but that's not a, you know, full CRM. And it's definitely not an agency management platform. And I think it's super important, from a data integrity perspective, that you're using a system and, obviously, know, AgencyBloc has been our most requested partner. So for us, this was a no brainer.
CS: Love it. Anytime you have those customers that that are looking for CRM just you know where to send them, Korey, we're happy to help them out.
And again, I think I've mentioned this internally to Scott and many others, anytime I'm at a conference, one of the first things customers ask about is how to better connect those tools that they use. They just want it seamless. They don't want to the data multiple times. They want to solve the problems that you guys just described. So I love it.
Scott, when we think about our strategy, you mentioned that we have other integrations with quoting and enrollment solutions, Medicare-specific outside of that, we have other integrations. Why is it important for us to connect with multiple solutions rather than a kind of one-size-fits-all? Hey, this is our preferred partner and this is who we'll integrate with?
SS: Yeah, it's a great question. And honestly, it goes back to what we were just talking about that Korey brought up is data, right? In many, many ways. The reality is agencies come in all shapes and sizes. They're different between what they sell or what they focus on, where they are in the hierarchy, right? Are they uplines? Are they downlines? Where are they? How they operate, right? Even like, are they more simple in terms of what they want to do to drive their business? Are they more complex? And so they operate in all of these ways.
But one thing that's been clear to us, is they all have some type of system, but their system isn't one piece of software. Their system is what I think of as the hodgepodge, right? They have a hodgepodge. And that's okay. It works for them. They have Outlook or Google Calendar because they use that. They use a Calendly, they use spreadsheets. They use all these pieces. I would love for them to use more and more of AMS+, but at the end of the day, what we think is so important is being flexible and how they use it.
And that flexibility is that underlying point. At the end of the day, if they have a quoting and enrollment tool that they would prefer to use, why not us integrate with them? We know what we're trying to do in many ways is integrate with the most important pieces of that hodgepodge to make that streamline, to make it so that they don't have to enter data in lots of places, so that they can reduce that administrative burden.
So they spend their time serving clients, not keeping systems up to date. And so for me, it's about how do we play a role in creating a seamlessly integrated experience in that hodgepodge, right? I'm under no delusions that they're gonna only use us. I think, Cory, to your point, they use all kinds of tools in all kinds of different ways. I think in many ways, it's our job to enable that flexibility and allow them to run their agency the way they need to run it.
KA: I'll jump in there, too, because like I'd say, from our perspective, we want to be a good growth partner. And I think that that's why this feels like a very natural relationship for us, because that's the way you think about your role in the agents' ecosystem as well. We, of course, both provide great technology solutions. There's a lot of things you can do with it, but also we recognize that people have their own systems. Some of them have way too many systems. We could do a whole other session on streamlining your technology because I think it's really overwhelming. There's so many different solutions, so many different products out there. And I think agents don't really know exactly what direction to run.
But if we can be one key piece of that and we can help streamline in any way. We work with multiple partners as well because we have the same philosophy. We're going to meet you where you're at and we want to be a good growth partner. And if we can simplify it, great, because the reality is, agents aren't going to do double entry. They are going to take the path of least resistance because they, too, are focused, especially with where the industry has gone in the last year or two and all of the upheaval.
They're just focused on making sure their clients are insured and that they hopefully are getting compensated for their work. And the last thing that they need to focus on is trying to also do duplicate data entry. They're not going to. And then they're gonna be basically doing themselves a disservice. So we're in the same place as you guys. Let's enable people to work with the systems that they're already working with.
SS: You know, Korey, we did some work with some of our smaller businesses. It turns out that the average small business, small agency uses 8.4 tools — 8.4! I mean, think about that for a second. Imagine navigating that system. I mean, one of the things that we talked about early on as we were getting together between the two companies was HealthSherpa has a reputation of creating simpler experiences.
And that is so key for what we're trying to do. And so, you know, if we can do some of that, if you can do some of that, if we can simplify that world for these agencies, man, they're going to be able to really provide that coverage to their clients, which is what they get excited about.
KA: Yeah, exactly.
CS: I feel like we should have a dedicated episode just called hodgepodge.
KA: I would love that. I love to nerd out over technology.
CS: We'lldo a sequel called Hodgepodge. Love it. And to your point, Korey, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a customer at Medicarians and you're talking about, you know, duplicate data entry or having to get the data in. And this agency owner actually had to finally tell his agents, if you don't put all of your data in after AEP so I can understand my book of business and help the agency manage our book. We're not going to pay commissions on those policies.
So it surfaces not actually the solution. It surfaces the problem, right? The problem is it needs to be seamless. It needs to sync. It needs to work well at all layers, and I think he was trying to solve the problem with a stick and not a carrot, but, it'd be great for us as technology platforms to just solve this for the agents. They don't want to enter the data again. They've already had to put it in once into one platform. So, I love the approach.
One thing, and I think back to what you were saying, Scott, we have a lot of these integrations. I always think of us as trying to be Switzerland. I've used that analogy many times over our history. We're going to connect with to the platforms that our customers are using. HealthSherpa obviously has a storied history of success in the ACA market. And it's only just recently, maybe in the past, I don't know, a couple of years, Korey, where, the Medicare investment and solution came out. How was HealthSherpa's approach the same or different from the other players? Why get into Medicare when ACA is such a significant and strong part of the business? Can you share anything on that?
KA: I think the initial ideas came from our agents, right? Like we're very driven by our users and agents and agencies were asking for a unified experience. Once again, same concept, like simplifying business, right? Is there already using HealthSherpa for ACA, and as the ACA market was going through some changes, like a lot of people were trying to diversify their books, which is great business advice, but they really wanted to have one source.
And not be once again duplicate data entry. It always comes back to like easier workflows. And so that's part of it.
I would say that the other component, too, was just making sure we protected our ACA business. We didn't want someone else to come to market and have that same end-to-end solution. So it just really kind of made sense for us to build out a Medicare side of the house and it's been incredibly well received.
I do think, I always joke, that we had the luxury of seeing how others have done this and how others have built their systems and being able to maybe close some of the gaps that other people haven't. That's why, when you have a new technology vendor to the market, eventually we will be the ones who there's a new technology vendor, right? And they'll learn from whatever it is that maybe we could have tweaked differently. But foundationally, we are really focused on the agent as our customer.
So I think that is at the core of what is our differentiator. And there's a lot of things that come of that philosophy and like a lot of implications, but, ultimately, I think some of our competitors really look at the upline or the top of hierarchy as the customer, nothing wrong with that. But we have a different philosophy. Our customer is the agent and we're going to build product and technology for the agent and the agency.
And then we're going to enable the uplines to have visibility and be able to better support. But we're still building the technology for the person who's actually using it. And I think that that's really important. And I think that philosophy has colored the way that we've built our platform. And I think that's why agents are flocking to us because we built it for you. And then agencies are working with us because their agents are growing.
They're having streamlined operations and then we're enabling them with great visibility and reporting. And so they're excited for the partnership as well.
SS: Well, and I think that the cheers we got from our agents who were in the audience at our user conference, BlocBuilder, would absolutely say that you guys were on the right track in doing that. They were thrilled that we're doing this together. We really saw that, heard that a lot as we announced that on stage.
CS: And I think one of the things we've heard, a lot of times technology is about removing friction. And one of the things we've heard historically is like, "Hey, if I'm working with multiple uplines, I've got different quoting and enrollment technologies that I have to use for those different uplines." So I like the approach, Korey, I like the vision around it being agent centered. You know, it's really what we think about every day at AgencyBloc is how to give them technology to make them effective. And we're thinking about everything they do from the minute they get to the office, to the time that they shut the computer down, and maybe even after with the mobile app, Scott, when they're taking phone calls, you know, after hours from customers, right, and how that experience works.
But I love that we're both focused on the same thing at the center of what we're trying to build. And I think the connection point here is going to be really, really valuable for customers. So maybe to that, Korey, as it relates to like, learning more about the solution, understanding a bit more like how it would work for, you know, for agents, what's the best way for agents to learn more about HealthSherpa for Medicare and what the solution does?
KA: We actually recommend that you go to healthsherpa.com and you'll see right on the homepage, create a Medicare account if you haven't already. It's a great starting point. Right within there, there's a support tab and you can join live trainings. You can actually book one-on-one sessions via Zoom. So if you have some troubleshooting or some onboarding support that you need help with, we actually offer those as well.
I know that as we get close to launch, we're going to do some collaborative sessions. So keep an eye out for those as well, because we'll be able to show you that end-to-end workflow. But I think like what I would love people to walk away from this with is not only are we going to, be integrated so some data passes. We've been very thoughtful collectively about what data passes,. So not only are you going to be able to have your customer demographic information passing, but your drugs and your doctors and your pharmacies. And so all that work that you've done creating these client records and building your agency in AgencyBloc, you'll be able to funnel that data over into your HealthSherpa for Medicare.
I think that's fantastic. And then conversely, when you're done, all that data is going to funnel back over. So you'll have a full source of truth that's living in your AMS+. And so I love that. And I think that that is just something you need to be very conscious of as an agency owner when you're choosing your technology vendors and you're building your agency. Ask these questions and think about this. Cause I'm sure that some people who are watching this are not, maybe not our users yet, either ours or yours. And so, you know, not only do we want to talk about how great this solution is, but we want to teach you the right questions to ask. We've all been around in technology for a long time.
So these are things that I wish I had known back when I had an agency and things that we would love to impart on you.
CS: Love it. Love the consultative sales approach as well. That's great. So Scott, think the natural question, I don't know if I'm allowed to put you on the spot around timeline and actually before I say that, I bet you're looking at the calendar and do you have like a countdown to AEP versus like a countdown to Christmas? Is that what you had like a little thing on the wall?
SS: What's Christmas again? I'm only thinking about AEP and OEP at this point.
One of the things we've heard from our agents loud and clear is what we release matters, but when we release it matters as well. And I think that, I think you're exactly right, Cory. The natural question is when is this coming out? And so, HealthSherpa and AgencyBloc are absolutely committed to getting this out before the enrollment periods. In my mind, that is mid Q3 that we're working through. And we'll be doing a pilot, or a beta, before that in the coming weeks and months and looking forward to that. And as Korey said, we'll have a number of marketing, a number of communications, a number of trainings to make that available. What we know is we've got to get this out before that crazy time of year starts. And then maybe I can start to think about the holiday season after that.
KA: I mean, this is really a gift.
SS: There you go! I like that, Korey. That's great. It's a gift, exactly. And we're making sure it's the right gift done in the right way, in a simple way, so that our clients can just use it. And then it speeds up and helps them do what they do. I love that. I think that's exactly right.
CS: I also love the thoughtfulness around the solution and making sure it works well for customers. I think the good news is there's been no lack of interest in being part of a pilot or a beta. I think we're fielding those on a regular basis between HealthSherpa and AgencyBloc. So we got a good group that we'll be able to test this out with as well.
Well, thank you, Scott and Korey. Thanks so much for joining, sharing your insights as it relates to the integration that's coming, how it helps create better connected and efficient agencies. I'm personally really excited to see this come to fruition and hear feedback from customers as to how it better solves the challenges that they have running an agency and becoming more effective.
Until next time, thanks so much for tuning in to Inside the Industry and what's shaping the future of insurance tech, and we will see you next time.
KA: Thanks.
SS: Thank you all.
Posted
on Friday, May 29, 2026
in
Inside the Industry
- industry news
- open enrollment
- productivity
- quoting