Employee benefits model that outperforms traditional health plans

Cancer compounds the challenge. At a presentation to the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce Association during the summer of 2026, attended by approximately 35 senior human resources professionals, Nordby asked the room to raise their hand if they did not currently have an active cancer case within their plan. Not a single hand went up. 

Managing cancer well requires specialist vendor partners with deep expertise across cancer types. General healthcare providers, however respected, typically lack the granularity to differentiate treatment protocols across subtypes, which leads to wasted care, worse outcomes, and higher plan costs.  

What HR leaders should expect from their benefits advisor 

The broker relationship, Nordby believes, has fundamentally changed and HR leaders should be demanding more from it. The era of an annual renewal conversation followed by 12 months of silence is over. What a good benefits advisor offers today is year-round analysis: tracking claims trends, identifying emerging cost drivers, and benchmarking the plan against competitors in the same labor market. 

That last piece is where M3’s AI platform, BrokerPRO, comes in. Nordby describes it as a tool that surfaces, for the first time, how an employer’s benefit plans compare to those of neighboring organizations competing for the same talent. 

“Most groups don’t really know how their benefit plans stack up to the neighboring benefit plans,” he said. “If we can show them where they’re falling short, where they’re maybe spending too much money and right-size that they are going to be able to deploy their resources to the right places, which is ultimately going to help them attract and retain employees.”