For Employers
Maternity is the most expensive predictable episode in your plan.
Most of what gets spent shouldn't have to.
Warranty-backed maternity navigation for self-funded employers. Built by a payer-side specialty-risk leader who owns a national maternity book. Designed to be measured. Reports against your baseline.
Talk to the founder See the model ↓Self-funded employers are paying full price for predictable failure.
The data has been there for years. What hasn't existed is a model where someone's economics depend on using it.
Maternity is approximately 12% of total cost of care for employers with young workforces — and the most actionable line item in the medical book. The average commercial maternity episode now costs $20,416. The average NICU admission is $71,158. NICU admission rates have climbed from 8.7% to 9.8% in less than a decade. C-section rates range from 13% to 83% across hospitals inside the same metro. None of this is news to your actuary.
What's new is that the variability is measurable — and the failures are preventable — at a unit cost in defensible proximity to the savings.
All figures from published sources. Methodology and references at the end of this page.
The dollar problem is a measurement problem.
The measurement problem is a maternal mortality problem.
The US has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. The rate for Black mothers is more than three times the rate for white mothers, holding income constant. Postpartum depression is identified in only 59% of cases at the standard six-week visit. These are not separate problems. They are downstream consequences of a model where no single party is accountable for the episode from confirmation to twelve weeks postpartum.
Waybright is structurally accountable for the episode. The same person stays with the member through delivery and recovery. Risk stratification happens at intake. Every screening that should happen does happen, or is documented as missed. The data your population generates becomes your population's protection.
One navigator. Twelve weeks past delivery.
A warranty against readmission. Measured against your baseline.
Waybright does not deliver your members' care. Their OB stays their OB. Their hospital stays their hospital. Waybright is the independent layer accountable for the episode, and it reserves capital against what gets missed.
Waybright is maternity episode navigation for self-funded employers. A named navigator is assigned at pregnancy confirmation and stays with the member through delivery and twelve weeks postpartum. Risk stratification at intake. Facility-level steering. Postpartum screening at 2, 6, and 12 weeks. A 30-day readmission warranty backed by our own economics.
Waybright runs on claims data and clinical decision rules — and a machine learning model that surfaces patterns the rules miss. The model is the navigator's clinical co-pilot. It flags. The navigator decides. We do not use AI to replace clinical judgment. We use it to give one person the pattern-recognition reach of a team.
Everything above is the standard offer at every plan size. No feature gates. No upsell.
Maternity deserts are a land statistic.
Your workforce is a people statistic.
35% of US counties have no birthing facility or OB clinician. That number is real — but it describes land, not people. 93.6% of the US population lives within 30 minutes of an obstetric hospital. For a metro-concentrated self-funded employer, the true no-access tail is 3–4% of pregnancies. The other 96% have hospitals they could reach but don't know about.
The real gap is quality blindness. 24% of low-volume hospitals sit within 30 miles of a higher-volume hospital. Severe maternal morbidity is higher at low-volume facilities. The member who delivers at the closer hospital when the better hospital is twelve minutes farther didn't make a bad choice — she made the only choice she knew she had.
We haven't found a competitor that models this. Waybright does — with a four-tier steerability engine that classifies every member's geography and facility access, then adjusts the service model and the economics accordingly.
Tier classification uses CMS Hospital General Information (5,432 facilities), Birthing-Friendly designations, CMS star ratings, and PostGIS proximity analysis. Modeled tier shares for a representative metro employer: 55% full choice, 24% quality-blind, 18% single facility, 3% desert. All figures illustrative until validated per-employer.
The effective steerable fraction for a metro-concentrated employer is 85.6%. The gross modeled savings are $376,003. The sensitivity holds $323K–$383K across 50–90% steerable. No single input is load-bearing.
Sources: March of Dimes Maternity Care Deserts Report 2024. PMC11080172 (obstetric hospital access, 2024). PMC8501399 (birth volume & geographic distribution, 2010–2018). PMC9258807 (true choice in birth settings).
We attest, and we post a bond.
Waybright doesn't deliver your members' care. Their OB stays their OB. Their hospital stays their hospital. The entity reserving capital against the miss is independent of the entity that delivered the care — and that independence is what makes the commitment mean something.
A value-based provider that delivers the care and reports its own outcomes is grading its own test. We have no downstream interest in what care gets delivered, because we deliver none of it.
An auditor only attests. A provider only delivers. Waybright attests to a result it did not produce — against your own baseline, not a control group of our choosing — and posts a bond against it.
- Chooses the treatment
- Performs the delivery
- Bills for the service
- Surfaces the quality data
- Coordinates the care
- Pays the readmission we should have caught
If we miss it, we pay for it.
The 30-day readmission warranty is the structural commitment that aligns everyone's incentives with yours. If a navigated member is readmitted within 30 days of delivery for a complication we should have caught — medication reconciliation missed, follow-up not scheduled, screening not completed — Waybright pays the full hospital bill. We reserve capital against that exposure at 1.75x expected loss. Our platform fee is forfeited for missed population targets on top of it. Not insurance you file against. Not a credit memo.
This is not a performance guarantee buried in a rider. It is a contractual warranty — reserved-capital and fee-at-risk — triggered by claims data. If we navigate the episode well, the warranty rarely fires. If something is missed, we absorb it. You don't pay for it twice.
The warranty is the operator forcing function.
The reserve is sized at 1.75x expected loss — toward the conservative end of new-product-line precedent (industry range 1.3-2.0x). The math, per 10,000-employee plan (illustrative; mental-health/PPD excluded from warranty scope, pending actuarial certification): all-cause readmission exposure of $59,400 (220 pregnancies × 1.5% baseline × $18,000); roughly 65% falls within warranty scope ($38,610); after the modeled 30% readmission reduction, net expected payout is $27,027; reserved at 1.75x = $47,297 held against the warranty. Reserve methodology and fee-at-risk terms are auditable. The full calculation is published in the warranty white paper.
Read the warranty white paper →Per-employer pricing. Per-episode performance.
| Tier | PEPM | Employee Count |
|---|---|---|
| Tier I | $8.00 | 1,000 - 5,000 |
| Tier II | $6.00 | 5,000 - 25,000 |
| Tier III | $4.50 | 25,000+ |
Illustrative pricing. All tiers include the named navigator model, claims-integrated risk stratification, facility-level steering, and the 30-day readmission commitment.
ROI illustration: A 10,000-employee self-funded employer generates approximately 220 pregnancies per year at Tier II ($6.00 PEPM, $720K annual). Not every member can be steered — the model accounts for that. A four-tier steerability engine classifies each member's geography and facility access, then weights the savings accordingly. The effective steerable fraction is 85.6%.
| Lever | Conservative | Expected | Optimistic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier-weighted facility steering | $97K | $128,058 | $150K |
| NICU avoidance | $153K | $230K | $307K |
| Readmission reduction | $12K | $18K | $24K |
| Gross modeled savings | $262K | $376,003 | $481K |
| Savings ÷ annual cost ($720K) | 0.36x | 0.52x | 0.67x |
Modeled savings for a representative metro-concentrated employer. Steerability-adjusted: four-tier model weights savings by each member's geography and facility access. Conservative = 50% steerable, 10% NICU reduction. Expected = 85.6% steerable, 15% NICU reduction. Optimistic = 95% steerable, 20% NICU reduction. Sensitivity: gross holds $323K–$383K across 50–90% steerable at constant NICU; no single input is load-bearing.
The expected case doesn't exceed the program cost. We publish this honestly. The savings are real but the ROI is not the point — the warranty is. The financial return is the savings. The structural return is that someone's economics now depend on catching what the data already shows.
The same arithmetic, at your size.
The example above is fixed at 10,000 employees. Set your own count and every figure below rebuilds from the constants already printed on this page. Nothing else enters the math.
Illustrative pricing. Scaled from the worked example above: 220 pregnancies per 10,000 employees, savings weighted by the four-tier steerability model. All figures illustrative until validated per-employer.
Want the live model for your population? Email joe.nalley@showyourwork.health.
What a contract looks like, end to end.
What's actually different about this.
| Dimension | Standard Nav | Pomelo Care | Maven Clinic | Waybright |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Navigator continuity | Call center rotation | Care team, not named | Care advocate assigned | Named. Same person. Every phase. |
| Risk stratification | Standard screening schedule | Predictive model, proprietary | Questionnaire-based | Claims-integrated. Flags risk before symptoms. |
| Site-of-care steering | None | Virtual-first, limited facility guidance | Provider directory | Facility-level C-section and NICU data. Member's hospitals. |
| Postpartum window | 6-week OB visit | Through postpartum | Variable by plan | 12 weeks. Screening at 2, 6, 12 weeks. |
| Outcome accountability | None | Published outcomes, no warranty | ROI claims, no warranty | 30-day readmission warranty. Contractual. |
| PEPM transparency | Bundled in admin | Custom pricing | Custom pricing | Published tiers. No implementation fee. |
| Who bears the cost of failure | None | Provider (delivers the care) | No financial guarantee | Waybright pays the bill it should have caught, reserved at 1.75x, plus fee at risk |
This was built by the operator, not the optimist.
Before this, I built a 13-location integrated health system from the ground up — behavioral health, SUD/MAT, primary care, urgent care, lab, imaging, surgical center, and a community hospital — and ran it as CEO through acquisition. I founded and sold ClearBill, a billing-integrity platform that returned $9.2M to payers in its first six months of full deployment. Across the lifetime of the companies I've led, more than 200,000 patients have been served.
What hasn't existed is a model where someone's economics depend on catching what the data already shows. The warranty is that model. Waybright is the company built around it.
This works fastest with a partner who already has the distribution.
The beachhead is self-funded employers with 1,000 to 25,000 employees. This is the population where maternity costs are visible on the P&L, the benefits team has authority to pilot, and the data exists to measure before and after. Two to three employer contracts validate the model and generate the outcome data that makes the next conversation easier.
The scale path is fully-insured. Once outcome data exists — C-section rate reductions, NICU avoidance, readmission warranty performance — the model ports to health plans as a delegated maternity navigation program. The plan distributes. Waybright navigates. The warranty transfers.
The fastest version of this involves a coalition partner: a benefits consultant, TPA, or health plan that already has the employer relationships and wants to add a warranty-backed maternity product to their portfolio without building one. We bring the clinical model, the navigator operations, and the warranty economics. They bring the distribution.
Investors, strategic acquirers, and distribution partners: joe.nalley@showyourwork.health
Every figure on this page is sourced.
Every number we report is auditable.
Waybright publishes quarterly outcome reports for every employer client. C-section rate vs. baseline. NICU admission rate vs. baseline. Postpartum screening completion. Readmission rate and warranty utilization. If the methodology works, the numbers will show it. If it doesn't, we'll publish that too. Every projection on this page is derived from published actuarial literature and public data sources. No proprietary claims data was used in any figure on this site.
What buyers ask.
What does the warranty actually cover?+
A 30-day postpartum readmission for a navigated member, within the covered obstetric categories, where the condition should have been caught: medication reconciliation missed, follow-up not scheduled, screening not completed. Waybright pays the full hospital bill, reserved at 1.75x expected loss. Our platform fee is forfeited for missed population targets. Covered conditions include postpartum hemorrhage, C-section wound infection, pre-eclampsia, endometritis, and DVT/PE. Waybright screens for postpartum depression as part of navigation — the navigator catches it, connects you to care, and coordinates. The warranty covers obstetric readmissions; the screening is the product.
How long does implementation take?+
Claims feed connection and eligibility file loading. No platform build, no IT project. Navigators are briefed on your population profile before the first member is enrolled. Most implementations are live within 30 days of contract signature.
What data do you need from us?+
Monthly claims and pharmacy data feed (standard 837/NCPDP). Eligibility file for enrolled population. No EHR integration required. No member app. The navigator works by phone, not software.
Why doesn't the ROI exceed the program cost?+
Because we modeled it honestly. Not every member can be steered to a better hospital — some live where there's only one. The steerability engine accounts for that. The gross savings are real ($376,003 expected for a 10K employer) and they offset a meaningful share of the program cost. The remainder buys you something we haven't found anywhere else: a contractual warranty against readmission, backed by reserved capital, from an entity independent of the care delivery. The value is structural, not just arithmetic.
What about maternity deserts?+
We don't pretend steering works where there's nowhere to steer. Desert-tier members (~3% of a metro employer's population) receive telehealth-MFM coordination, remote monitoring (BP, glucose, weight), and the same 30-day warranty. The margin is thinner and we model it that way. The warranty still applies because risk stratification and care coordination work regardless of geography.
How is Waybright independent?+
Waybright never earns a fee from where care is delivered. No referral fees, no owned network, no preferred-facility placement. The member's OB stays her OB. Her hospital stays her hospital. We inform and coordinate. When we post a bond against the outcome, the independence is what makes the commitment credible — we're grading someone else's test, not our own.
Or email directly: joe.nalley@showyourwork.health