Like retirement planning, health care planning is easiest for the young. Unlike retirement planning, time is rarely on the client’s side when it comes to health care.

A recently created educational platform and digital portal, HealthStyles.net, hopes to deliver awareness of lifetime health care planning options to families and individuals via institutions, employers, associations and advisors.

When clients are young and healthy, they can avail themselves of more plentiful and less expensive options to cover their future health care expenses, and as they age, their options become fewer and more expensive, says J. Heywood Sloane, principal of Diversified Services Group, the Wayne, Pa.-based financial consultancy that created HealthStyles.net.

Yet advisors are rarely engaging with clients in health care planning until they are at or near retirement, says Sloane, which is why HealthStyles.net was created.

“Right now, what’s happening is that advisors aren’t addressing client health until Medicare or Social Security decisions are coming up,” says Sloane. “Other advisors only discuss these issues through the portfolio, or products. Advisors have to get away from that investment centricity if they want to add value to their services through healthcare planning.”

HealthStyles.net offers tools to foster collaborations between individuals, their families, their health care team and their financial team. For example, the platform tailors an “information map” to each user’s health objectives and the solutions necessary to meet their desired outcomes.

Educational modules teach users about caregiving roles, financial tools and government programs that can be used to fund health care needs, manage risks, and foster health care communications.

The program was originally designed as a collaborative platform with two parallel educational programs that advisors and clients could use in tandem, but Sloane focused more on institutions as the need for awareness and knowledge around health care planning became clear.

Advisors are often reticent to discuss health issues with their clients, notes Sloane, which is one reason the topic is often neglected until a decision involving Medicare or Social Security is made.

“When advisor are asked whether their clients are concerned about health care, almost all of them recognize it as a top-of-mind issue,” says Sloane. “Yet when advisors are asked if they’re capable of helping their clients address health care funding concerns, we find that most of them say ‘No, we don’t have the expertise.’”

HealthStyles.net modules are directed towards individuals, says Sloane, and are being used by employers in tandem with health coverage and financial wellness plans, by credit unions interested in acting as advocates for their memberships, and by insurance companies that see the modules as complements to their products.

Advisors should still play a role in health care planning, says Sloane, and be fluent enough in medical topics to help clients access information and resources. Health care gives advisors an opportunity to engage with clients at every stage in life; thus, addressing health care plans may be a potent value add for advisors and may boost client satisfaction, loyalty and retention.

“The value of investment management is basically being commoditized, and the DOL rule is creating a transparency in the industry that will lead to more intense fee compression,” says Sloane. “Breakpoints are going lower and lower. If advisors want to maintain their level of compensation, they have to think about adding additional value that’s relevant to what they’re doing. One of the best spaces that they can do that in is helping clients think through the ramifications of their health care choices.”

Health care planning responsibility is shifting from doctors and organizations to individuals and families, says Sloane, just as financial responsibility for health care also moves away from government and employers and towards individuals. Just as the health care burden lands on individuals, the planning issues are increasing in number and complexity.

Health care issues tend to be unpredictable. Younger individuals need to be empowered to make informed choices around the health care uncertainties they may face later in life, says Sloane.

“If you don’t figure out how your’e going to fund future expenses now and take care of all the tiers and pieces of a plan that are available at a younger age, a health care plan might not work,” says Sloane. “A health care plan becomes increasingly unaffordable as you age, potentially impossible if you wait too long.”

HealthStyles.net views health and caregiving as a continuum spanning individuals’ entire adult lives. For example, clients in their 20s and 30s are “invincible” and need to understand healthcare and retirement expenses as they relate to employer plans, health savings accounts and group disability coverage.

HSAs are a particular area of weakness when advice is delivered by an advisor, plan sponsor or human resource director, says Sloane.

“The industry is selling these as transactional accounts, and the employer is doing it to reduce the cost of their insurance,” says Sloane. “Most of the people offering HSAs are being compensated by the transactions going in and out of it, not for the growth of assets within them. If people aren’t informed of the benefits of HSAs as savings vehicles, they’re probably missing out on one of the best opportunities they have to mitigate their health care risk later in life through the tax advantages.”

In their 30s and 40s, clients enter the “family years” where they need information about life insurance and guidance about caring for elderly parents and children with special needs.

As clients get older, their health and financial concerns tend to multiply. Among the issues that should be addressed near and through retirement are needs like developing elder care funding strategies, arranging health care and financial documents, creating an estate plan and considering Medicare strategies.

“When most people get to the age where they are ready for Medicare, people deluge them with information about the program’s basic framework and all the products that could fit into that framework,” says Sloane. “Consumers are bombarded by pharmacy plans and Medicare supplements and specialized coverage. None of this information talks about how to determine which plan works best for which client, it’s all about how these products fit in with Medicare. If the recipient of the information doesn’t understand how the plans and Medicare work together in practice, the information isn’t going to be useful.”

For example, few individuals are educated about the portability of their Medicare coverage, says Sloane. While traditional Medicare is portable across state lines, Medicare Advantage plans may not follow an individual as they travel.

Tying the health care lifecycle together is the caregiving continuum, the cycle by which parents care for young and/or disabled children, spouses care for each other, and children care for aging parents. HealthStyles.net emphasizes caregiving by making it the first area of concentration for its modules.

“Everybody, at a minimum, will receive care throughout their life, but more likely than not they’re also going to end up giving care to a spouse, or to children, or to parents at some point or throughout their life,” says Sloane. “That’s an important concept that people need to understand.”

HealthStyles.net addresses risk management directly via a module that discusses the unpredictability of health care and steps that can be taken to mitigate unknowns like if and when cognitive decline will occur, who in the family will need care first and whether a family’s assets will be sufficient to across the duration of their caregiving needs.

Health care communications are also addressed via the educational modules. While issues like discussing health care plans among family members, making caregiver decisions and drafting documentation to clarify end-of-life choices are covered, Sloane says that communication needs to be thought of on a more practical, elemental level.

“Health care communication can be as simple as establishing a communications tree,” says Sloane. “Not having a communications plan becomes extremely burdensome for caregivers, it’s a logistical nightmare. They need to have a plan for how to tell people information ahead of time.”

The portal also provides modules on elder abuse and senior housing. At the end of each module, a list of resources guides users towards additional information and assistance.

Users of HealthStyles.net can access a secure, compliant health care and planning document vault to ease communications.

Reconnecting and engaging with health stakeholders on an ongoing basis allows plans to be adjusted as regulations, policies, products and an individual’s health and finances change.