How Nice Healthcare Brings Primary Care Home—Zero Cost, No Clinics, and No Catch with Jory Zunich

In this Solution Spotlight episode of Risk & Resolve, host Ben Conner sits down with Jory Zunich, SVP of Growth at Nice Healthcare, to explore how one company is rewriting the rules of primary care. From a founder’s frustration with a broken system to a nationwide movement delivering affordable, accessible care — this conversation reveals how healthcare can finally work for everyone.

Episode Highlights:

• The origin story of Nice Healthcare — born from a father’s $700 emergency bill and a mission to fix care
• How virtual, in-home, and workplace visits remove the need for clinics entirely
• Why 70% of everyday healthcare can now be delivered at no cost to employees
• The secret to Nice Healthcare’s quality — full-time, W2 care teams, not gig workers
• How the model includes free prescriptions, labs, X-rays, mental health, and physical therapy
• Why employers across 15 states love it — lower costs, faster access, and real ROI
• The 2026 Indiana launch and exclusive partnership with leading broker firms

A forward-looking episode on innovation, empathy, and the reimagining of American healthcare — not through more complexity, but through simplicity, trust, and care that comes to you.

Transcript

Welcome And Solution Spotlight Setup

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We're listening to Risk and Resolve, where leadership, business, and risk and lie, and bring you real conversations, sharp insights, and strategies for success. And now for your host, Ben Connor and Todd Hoffman.

Why Nice Healthcare Exists

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Welcome back to another episode of Risk and Resolve. I'm your host, Ben Connor. Uh, and today we have Jory Zunik, SVP of Growth from Nice Healthcare. And today is the first of its kind special episode to Solution Spotlight to talk about nice healthcare. So we'll probably have to have Jory back on to talk about his personal story on another episode. But here, we're here today to talk about nice healthcare. And Jory, thanks for joining joining me today. Thanks, Ben. It's great to be here. Yeah. So uh just for this solution spotlight, let's let's just dive in. Uh what tell us how what nice healthcare is and and why it exists today.

Indiana Employers Discover The Model

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Sure. Yeah. Um nice healthcare is a primary care clinic, and we specialize in virtual and in-home care. And so, you know, the very obvious strategy that we've put together is that we've taken real estate out of our business model, right? We actually don't have any physical clinic locations. Uh, we practice virtual care. And if people need to be seen in person, we come to them uh in their home, at their place of work, um, anywhere within our service territory now across 15 states. Um it uh is a unique business model. Our CEO and co-founder uh was dealing with a sick child in Minnesota in the middle of winter. And it was one of those uh scenarios where you know they didn't know exactly what was going on with his son. High fever, but not a lot else going on, which led him to haul in his kiddo um into the clinic in the middle of winter to be told, hey, there's not much we can do here. You should go back home. Come back if the fever gets worse. Well, the fever gets worse, he's back in there. They say, hey, it's it's the same situation still, you know. And they at dawn they're sent back home, all to have him get really, really sick and have a bit of an emergent situation, right? Um, all of that followed with about a$700 bill. And he recalled being in that uh kind of exam room in an empty clinic, waiting and waiting and waiting with his wife and his son who didn't feel well. And so Thompson just started walking around. You know, he said, What's going on around here? Right. Um, his parents have a home healthcare business, you know, and he's walking into all these empty exam rooms. They all have a computer, they've got one piece of software on it, nothing else. All the drawers are empty. There's an X-ray machine sitting there that isn't being utilized, you know. So then he starts looking online, how much does an x-ray machine cost, right? Could I buy one of these? Um, and that put him down this path of saying, I think we can do this differently. Um, and he and his co-founders started a nice healthcare. It um and it's quickly uh expanded to ultimately helping thousands of employers um and um and brief uh um getting really close to about 200,000 members, right? You know, so it um it's a model that kind of flipped it, flipped it on its head, you know, in a way that allowed uh care to be affordable and accessible for for a lot of patients in a way that they are not accustomed to in healthcare by any means.

What Members Actually Get

SPEAKER_02 3:36

That's awesome. I so a little bit of backstory of uh why we're doing this solution spotlight. Um, I actually came into learning about nice healthcare uh from our experience of having uh uh several clients in the Minnesota market, and we are having conversations with employers, and they're like, hey, we really love what you're saying about supply chain and managing the health and health insurance uh delivery model. However, we have this solution called nice health care and don't mess with it because our employees love it, uh, which allowed us to say, well, what it what is that? And learn about it. And ultimately started us on a journey where about a year ago, Jory, we started talking about bringing nice healthcare as a solution to Indiana. Um just solve the problem that your founder uh uh found himself taking care of. You know, I see that even in our own household of when we have a sick child or otherwise, trying to solve for that, and it's it's painful, it's it's not fun. It's you know, you're going to a doctor's office where all the other sick people are. Um, there's just a lot of of uh just brokenness of the system and you see someone for 10 minutes. Um but anyway, so we are so pleased to bring nice healthcare to the Indianapolis market starting uh January 1st, 2026. I'm actually wearing, if you're watching this, wearing my shirt. That's a little bit of a shout out to IU, but it has a bunch of little Indianas on it to celebrate this launch of Nice Healthcare Indy, Indiana. So as uh people are listening to this and they're like, oh, that sounds interesting. Uh Jory, look talk to us about more of the detail of the actual deliverable. So you mentioned that it's a clinic without the brick and mortar, and we're actually going to people's homes. Um and there's also care delivered even in the uh workplace of an employer. But what type of care is delivered? What is the experience uh in services that an employee has access to through nice healthcare?

Breaking Cost And Access Barriers

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Yeah, and that's you know, that's a differentiator of our model as well. You know, uh for a lot of people listing, I'm assuming we're gonna be having like a fair amount of benefits advisors listing, employers in the community in Indiana. Um, our clinic offering is sold through our preferred broker partners to employers who are offering health benefits to their employees. Okay. So that's the only way that you gain access to a clinic at nice healthcare. We're not in the direct-to-consumer space. And what's really, really interesting about that is that the services I'm about to talk about actually represent about 70% of everyday health care for a typical patient. Um, and what that means is that they're gaining access to our clinical team for unlimited virtual and in-home primary care, right? So we can see people virtually border and border in the state of Indiana. If people live within our service territory, if they need to be seen in person, we're gonna come directly to them, whether that be at their home, at their place of work, um, at a family member's house, anywhere in that service territory. Um, our company also has a virtual physical therapy practice as well as a virtual mental health care practice. Um, something that's really, really cool about our model that um hardly anyone is doing is that we own all of these practices and all of these uh portions of our clinical team across primary care, physical therapy, and mental health care, these are full-time W-2 benefit eligible employees of Nice Healthcare. We're not farming people out to 1099 or part-time workers who are picking up a few hours here and there. This is all controlled in the Nice Healthcare ecosystem. We have built all of our apps and our technology. So patients who are seeing us in Indiana are getting the exact same care as patients who are seeing us in Washington, Minnesota, Colorado, Arizona, things along those lines, right? Um, that's a really important piece about what we do. There's also uh over 550 prescription drugs included at no cost if it's prescribed at our clinic. These prescription drugs represent the most commonly utilized drugs on employer-sponsored health plans. Uh, these drugs are now at no cost to those patients if they get it at nice health care. There's over 35 of the most common primary care labs as well. So that's that's also an expense that those patients are not having to worry about. We'll do those draws in-home. Uh, we also do in-home x-ray and EKG. Okay. Um if there's something that we can't do for the patient, we're gonna help coordinate a referral for them uh through our care coordination team. Um it's our care coordination team is uh always available through our website and our app. Uh, very speedy answers, right? You know, if you need something, they're there to support you. If you want to change pharmacies where you're picking up a prescription, send any men um any medical records to a different clinic or to a daycare, things along those lines. Uh there's also a provider chat feature where our providers follow up with patients, which our patients absolutely love because they get that additional touch point. But like I said, all this represents about 70% of everyday healthcare for a patient, where ultimately what we've done through these employers and our broker partners is break down the barriers to accessing care. These patients uh typically through insurance, you know this well, Ben. Um, you know, deductibles keep going up, co-pays keep going up, right? That's that's one of the only ways to control those premiums, right? And what that leads us to is that patients um have a lot of barriers to accessing care. You know, it might be the cost thing, right? You know, like Thompson's example, our CEO, you know, this$700 bill when he felt like he didn't really get any help, right? It um that's a huge barrier for families across America, right? They can't really deal with unexpected five, six, seven hundred dollar bills. And so breaking down that barrier to where people don't have to worry about the cost, uh um, but also see people, you know, within a 24-hour window when they want that care is very, very fast compared to a brick and mortar setting through insurance.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

So um that was gonna be one of my questions is how quickly people can be seen. So if someone engages in the app and they, you know, they are engages via chat and it's determined that people need to cut the the provider needs to come to them. Uh that's that can happen within 24 hours.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah, typically uh it's in a 24-hour window, a lot of times it's the same day. And so um, you know, accessing care is different in every state, right? But Ben, I think the last time I was in town, Vietnam, we had looked, you know, average timeframe to get a primary care appointment in the state of Indiana right now, I think it was 47 days. You um kind of accessing that care. So those are barriers for people too, right? Through a traditional system. Most people understand that they should be getting primary care and preventive care needs taken care of. They want to, but you add that cost component up with um calling to get that appointment and you're told it's 47 days out, and then the day comes, you got to take a half day off of work, and then you sit in the waiting room all for a short appointment, it's just not super appealing to people, right? It creates a lot of I call healthcare insecurities in the back of people's minds for why they might not access that care. But if you can break down those barriers, offer them this care in a way that uh, you know, really mimics a lot of the conveniences that we see in our life in other areas. You know, probably a lot of people listening are utilizing Instacart, DoorDash, Uber Eats. You know, these are things in which, you know, people are willingly paying more for those services to have them come come to us, you know. But the nice healthcare model through employers is a way where these patients actually don't have any cost associated with it whatsoever, but they get those modern conveniences.

SPEAKER_02 11:57

Yeah. Well, I think you know, someone, if they have to like set up an appointment and go see a doctor, um, you know, I even had an experience where um I have a DPC doctor, and I had a question about something. If I had to go in, I probably wouldn't have asked. But I was a little bit concerned enough that I was like, you know what, I'm gonna text the doctor and see what his thoughts were. And he was like, you know, I think you should come in. And then I was like, okay, fine, I will. And same thing applies here of how many visits do you think exist where someone probably is a little curious, but there's such a barrier with scheduling and the wait time and all those sorts of things where they don't get seen? And that could that could bubble into something even more drastic. Um creating that no-cost option uh for an employee is huge. Um couple questions. Uh, does it matter if someone is on a copay or a high deductible health plan if they can have access to nice health care?

Plan Types, Eligibility, And Families

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Um, yeah. So uh uh from a standpoint of those plan offerings, uh, there's been a lot of changes in the recent legislation, right? You know, so it um the laws currently surrounding virtual and remote care allow nice healthcare to offer these services at no cost. And so uh that's across Copay plans as well as HSA plans, right? It um it those rules and regulations have kind of varied um over time as well. So there's been time frames in which we've had um a visit fee associated with uh those HSA plan members, but currently most of our employers and broker partners are pulling those out um and doing care at no cost of nice healthcare.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

Yeah, so that means regardless of what plan someone's on, um that's certain those expenses basically it's paid for by the employer free to the employee for 70% of all healthcare services. That's incredible. Um, when you talk about paying for employees, so you know you have uh let's say an employer has 50 employees and they have 30 of those employees that are on the health plan. Um, what have you seen from employers? Do they typically pay for the 30 employees that are on the plan, or do they at times like pay for all employees to have the benefit? What have you seen as a model has been developed uh in other states?

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Yeah, most commonly um uh the most common practice you see is nice healthcare is added as a uh kind of a premium benefit that goes in conjunction with the enrollment on the employer-sponsored health plan, you know, where it um, you know, it's drawing those lines in terms of an employer's already taking on an expense of offering health insurance to those folks. It um it doesn't typically get extended into those kind of non-benefit eligible employees, but it but it does depending on the employer group, right? Who might say, hey, like we really want to service our part-time population, et cetera. Yep. And so so our clients really kind of work through that with our broker partners to kind of make an assessment of what fits their employer population or employee population, excuse me.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

So if they pay for an employee to have access to nice health care, is it just that employee or uh are there other family members in the home that are eligible to use the service? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Yeah, um, it is the employee as well as their benefit eligible family members. And so, you know, that's as defined by the employer, but typically you're talking about spouse, partners, um, as well as child dependents under 26. And so it um that's a that's a fan favorite as well of our employer partners, right? That we have that flexibility and that population to be able to extend to those benefit eligible family members.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

Uh, how old does a child need to be to be seen by nice healthcare? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Uh we start seeing patients at two weeks uh for like child well checks and things along those lines.

Clinics Versus At‑Home Care Economics

SPEAKER_02 16:10

That's great. That's great. Yeah, it's been interesting as we've had conversations with employers already. Um, you know, Indiana is a very um, Indiana adopted clinics uh uh uh across the state where we're used to the idea of, hey, we want to have this other type of benefit that's actually a benefit where people can see a provider for um more than 11 minutes and talk about their health care. Um and what's been fascinating to me um is that as we've looked at nice healthcare um in comparison with clinics, nice healthcare is actually um half or a third of traditional clinic costs. And um and instead of uh emplo employees needing to come to the employer's place of work, um nice healthcare will go to them. And if you think about that, that's probably a better thing anyway, because if you're sick, you don't want your sick population driving into work, you want them to be at home getting well and that sort of thing. Um, so that's really occurred to me that that could be a really positive, you know, clinic 2.0, if you will. Yeah. Um, you know, from what Indiana's experienced really over the last two decades. No, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

I mean, it's uh like even if you were to take away you know the cost of real estate, you know, healthcare real estate in any city for like a near site opportunity, it's some of the most extensive for real estate out there, right? You know, the strategy of moving into an on-site clinic model where an employer says, look, we've got a building already, we've got space already, you know, we can make this work on site. It um it still, like you said, puts people in a situation where it's an arrangement typically that might be for only employees and not family members. Um, or if you're not feeling well, you got to go in and you got to say, like, hey, why am I um going here and everybody can see him at the clinic today or whatever it might be, right? Um, not that it isn't great access to care, not that it's not great care. It's just one of those things that uh there's different ways to ultimately skin the cat and bring those benefits to people. And by taking out the real estate component, not asking an employer to get into the business of uh kind of establishing an on-site clinic and having a two, three-year contract with this kind of a specific vendor, they can get many of those benefits in the convenience of their patient's home.

unknown 18:48

Yeah.

Indiana Launch Partners And Service Area

SPEAKER_02 18:49

You know, as we were evaluating this, as I mentioned like a year ago, um, there was a circumstance at our house where, yeah, you know, we have three, three young, young kids, and one of them was sick. And so they had to get we had to take them out of school. And she had my wife had some of our, you know, one of our other kids with her, and she's having to drag all of them to the doctor's office. And I was like, hey, what if you didn't have to do any of this and they just came to you? She was like, Well, I don't know if that even exists, so I don't, I'm not even gonna comment on how nice that would be. But I was and I told her about nice healthcare. She's like, Well, why don't you just bring that here to Indiana then? Um, but here we are. Uh Nice Healthcare are going to be launching in Indiana 1 126. Um, and as you mentioned, and what we're really proud of is the deliverable uh of nice healthcare is through the broker channel and connection to health plans. And that's a preferred partner uh circumstance. So I'm really pleased to say that there are only three consulting firms um in the state of Indiana currently that is able to um to help employers uh access nice health care. And obviously, one would be Connor Insurance, uh, but also benefit innovations uh and integrity benefit partners. So the three of us have collaborated uh to make this happen, to bring this to the Indianapolis market. And we're fairly confident that it's gonna be land and expand. So not only are we looking at the Indianapolis market, again, the greater Indianapolis area, even up to like the Anderson almost Muncie area, uh north to um past Westfield, um, south to Greenwood, east over to Greenfield. Um, there's a really and then west uh to Brownsburg. So there's quite a service area that um will be able to serve uh employers and their employees with on-site care at home as well as in at the employer business. Um but we know that as this grows, we're gonna be able to expand that, um, not only expand the Indianapolis reach, which is already already pretty big, but uh looking at those markets at you know, Fort Wayne, Floomington, South Bend, El Card, Goshen, uh, up into the region, um, and you know, the north central part of the state as well, with uh Marion and Huntington and uh Kokomo, you know, we believe that this is going to be a game changer for employers and their employee workforce. Because the challenge that we see in healthcare is costs are going up, cost out of your paycheck is going up, and the deliverable that's left for employees is I have a high deductible, it's super expensive, and it doesn't feel good. And the problem is not only does it not feel good for the employee, it doesn't feel good for the employer because they're spending a lot of money. Yeah, this is an employee benefit where we find that um it is competitively priced because of the model. Um, and employees can get 70% of their healthcare services for free. Um, just incredible. Um, Jory, thanks for joining today. Um, again, we're we'll have to have you back to give an update on you know where we're at at with nice healthcare in Indiana, but also uh just to get your story because we got to have some coffee up in Minnesota and uh your journey is pretty epic as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Uh yeah, no, I appreciate it, Ben. Thank you for the partnership and thanks to all of our other broker partners in Indiana as well. We don't get to where we're going with making healthcare more affordable and accessible without you. And we're just we're uh we're super excited to get this thing launched and to have and to start taking care of your clients. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

Well, thanks to our listeners for joining the first solution spotlight on the Risk and Resolve pod. Uh thanks for joining us and have a great day. Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Have a great one. Thanks for tuning in to Risk and Resolve. See you next time.