Lucie Health Marketplace

Health insurance

Jul 23, 2026

The hidden costs of enrollment friction for brokers

By The Lucie Team
As a health insurance broker, Open Enrollment is the busiest time of the year. You’re juggling a flood of client questions, comparing plan options, managing paperwork, processing renewals, and trying to keep everything moving on tight deadlines.
Enrollment has gotten even more complicated lately. To keep things secure and protect consumers, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has added new potential safety checks – like verifying identity (ID proofing), and more thoroughly verifying eligibility information. While these steps are important, they do add more to your plate.
As you gear up for Open Enrollment season, it's worth taking a closer look at where your time is being wasted. Often, it's in the enrollment process itself. Every extra handoff, additional log in, separate payment, or follow-up email is a bump in the road for brokers and clients. Each one costs more than time. It creates confusion, slows enrollment, and increases the likelihood that clients give up before reaching the finish line.
"Business growth depends on bandwidth. The more time brokers spend chasing paperwork and next steps, the less time they have for the meaningful conversations that actually grow their business."
Joe Donlan, president of Lucie Health Marketplace

Every extra step puts an enrollment at risk

Enrollment rarely happens in one sitting. A client may need to gather income documentation, compare multiple plans, review provider networks, confirm subsidy eligibility, complete payment, or discuss supplemental coverage.
Modern Enhanced Direct Enrollment (EDE) platforms are meant to pull that whole journey into one smooth experience, helping you guide clients from start to finish with fewer stops and starts. The best platforms also let you quote and enroll clients in supplemental coverage alongside their health plan, without sending brokers or clients to a separate platform or workflow. But not every platform is created equal. Some still rely on disjointed workflows that force you and your clients to jump between different systems.
Pictured above: Lucie Health Marketplace allows brokers to access medical, ancillary, and more – all in a single shopping experience.
Those interruptions have consequences. When a client gets distracted and misses a payment link in their inbox, or they don’t upload a required document, that little hiccup quickly becomes hours of administrative work.
"Every additional step in the enrollment process creates another opportunity for a client to lose momentum,” Donlan said. “The goal of an EDE platform shouldn't simply be to digitize enrollment. It should make the experience easier for both the broker and the client."

Enrollment complexity hurts your relationships

One of the biggest bottlenecks often comes after a plan has been selected. Separate payment experiences, multiple checkout processes, or unclear next steps can create unnecessary back-and-forth between brokers and clients. When your client’s decisions have been made, they think they’re all set. But their coverage isn't complete until payment is successfully processed.
That can leave you tracking down clients, explaining payment instructions, answering questions, and checking whether coverage has actually been effectuated. These tasks might only take a few minutes each, but they add up fast. Multiplied across dozens or hundreds of enrollments, that admin time eats into the hours you could be spending on your business.
Consumers expect enrollment to be simple, fast and easy to understand – like opening a bank account or signing up for streaming services online. When they get hit with multiple insurance quotes, separate invoices, or several payment requests, they get frustrated and confused. That frequently leads clients to hesitate, delay, or even quit the process altogether.
When you can simplify the enrollment experience, your clients can move forward with greater confidence. You reduce the amount of time spent explaining the process, so you have more to provide sage advice. "The goal isn't simply to move faster," Donlan said. "It's to remove unnecessary friction so brokers can spend more of their day doing the work that only they can do – building relationships, advising clients, and growing their business."

Simpler workflows give you more time to grow

Technology alone won't solve every enrollment challenge. But the right platform can eliminate many of the mindless tasks that consume your days. That's the philosophy behind Lucie Health Marketplace's simpler workflows.
Lucie helps you move clients from quote to covered with fewer administrative hurdles by bringing ACA, supplemental, and ancillary products together in one CMS-approved EDE platform. Built-in payment capabilities and one-click ACA payments reduce unnecessary follow-up after plan selection. A single-price shopping cart makes it easier for clients to understand their total coverage costs, which simplifies enrollment conversations. And Rapid Renewal helps you complete repeat enrollments more efficiently, saving 6–8 minutes per renewal.1
Pictured above: With Lucie, you can explore medical, dental, vision and supplemental coverage all in one seamless shopping experience.
Individually, those improvements may seem small, but they can add up to hours you can put back into winning more clients and strengthening your existing client relationships.
How Lucie simplifies every enrollment:
  • Built-in payments keep the enrollment process moving by allowing clients to pay for supplemental products without leaving the experience.
  • One-click to ACA payments create a faster path from plan selection to effectuated coverage, helping reduce drop-off after enrollment.
  • A single-price shopping cart combines medical, supplemental, and ancillary products into one clear total, making a client’s view of their total coverage costs more clear.
  • Rapid renewal saves brokers time by streamlining repeat enrollments, reducing administrative work, and creating more time for client conversations and new business.
"At Lucie, we believe the broker is the most valuable part of the enrollment experience,” Donlan said. “Our job isn't to replace that expertise – it's to remove the friction that gets in the way of it. Because when brokers spend less time managing the process, they have more time helping clients find the coverage that's right for them."
1. Results may vary based on renewal complexity. Lucie internal test demonstrated time saved between 6-8 minutes.

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