Handl Health Expands Platform to Enable Rapid Growth in Alternative Health Plans

New updates have been reported about Handl Health.

Handl Health is expanding its technology platform to support the surge in demand from brokers, carriers and third-party administrators for variable-copay alternative health plans, positioning the company as an infrastructure provider for non-traditional medical benefits. The platform now connects carrier networks, provider and site-of-care performance data, and episode-based bundles into a single analytics and pricing layer, enabling administrators to design and launch alternative health plans as an end-to-end solution.

The company’s expansion comes as large employers increasingly move away from traditional medical plans facing double-digit cost increases, with nearly 65% either offering or evaluating non-traditional plan designs, according to Mercer’s 2026 health and benefits survey. Handl Health reports that more than 150,000 members are already enrolled in plans built on its platform, which can be deployed in about four months and are projected to deliver a 6% reduction in medical trend and approximately 22% average savings on shoppable services.

For carriers and TPAs that lack internal systems to manage alternative benefit structures, Handl Health’s offering provides data-driven provider tiering based on cost and quality, episode-based plan designs that simplify member out-of-pocket exposure, and embedded predictive analytics for continuous monitoring and plan customization. The platform also incorporates AI-enabled navigation using electronic health record data, allowing partners to steer members in real time toward higher-value sites of care and improve both cost and quality outcomes.

Avant Health’s chief executive describes Handl as central to its evaluation and construction of alternative health plans, citing the ability to benchmark costs, design network-equivalent strategies and operationalize guidance to high-value providers. Handl Health’s CEO, Ahmed Marmoush, frames the company’s strategy as enabling a structural redesign of health insurance, arguing that employers require material cost-curve improvements without sacrificing access or affordability and that payers need consumer-centric, value-oriented designs to meet that demand.

By unifying healthcare pricing, utilization, benefit and quality data in one operational layer, Handl Health aims to become core infrastructure for the next generation of employer-sponsored benefits, with direct implications for medical cost trend management and benefit strategy at large and midsize employers. The company is positioning itself at the center of a broader industry shift away from traditional fee-for-service plan designs and toward outcomes-driven, analytically priced alternatives that can be replicated and scaled across multiple markets and client types.