The making of a brand: Oscar Health redesigns its family of brands around individual choice

At our Investor Day in New York City, we introduced Oscar Health as our new parent company, with a new mission to give people more power over their healthcare. The announcement revealed a new business model built for a future in which more people choose their own healthcare products.

Chief Marketing Officer Kristen Prestano explains how the company is positioning two distinct businesses and turning the frustrations of healthcare into a promise consumers can understand.

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Why did Oscar need a parent brand?

Oscar Insurance has built strong recognition as a health insurance company, but our ambition is now broader than insurance alone. We needed a parent brand that could hold the larger idea: giving people more power over how they choose, use and experience healthcare.

Oscar Health gives us room to build toward that future while preserving what people already know about Oscar Insurance. Oscar Insurance designs innovative health plans and member experiences around people’s lives. Lucie Health Marketplace is a payer-agnostic shopping platform that helps people compare and choose coverage and other healthcare products all in one place. The parent brand grounds them through one mission without asking them to look alike, sound alike or serve the same audience.

Oscar Health’s long-term strategy is to expand the individual market, build Oscar Insurance into the consumer’s preferred individual-market carrier and make Lucie a leading marketplace for all health needs. The brand structure gives each part of that strategy a clear place to live.

Why make this change now?

The way people work and get health coverage is changing. More people move between jobs, work independently or combine different types of employment. CHOICE Arrangements (formerly ICHRA) also allow employers to fund individual coverage that employees choose for themselves.

Health insurance is traditionally a complex, confusing and opaque topic in America. Generally people would like to engage with it as little as possible, and trust that they've made the right choice for themselves and their families. Oscar Health is uniquely suited to help drive guided choices and better quality options for consumers to build that confidence in their decisions.

We see the ACA as the foundation for a much larger individual market. Oscar Health’s role is to help make that market easier for people to use, whether they are choosing a health plan or navigating their care.

How did you translate the mission of giving people more power into a visual identity?

The mission and identity developed in parallel. That allowed us to think about the company we are building and what the world could feel like when we succeed.

We kept coming back to a few questions: What does greater control feel like for a consumer? What would an easier healthcare experience look like? How should a company feel if it is helping people move through healthcare with more confidence?

We wanted the identity to convey that ambition without losing the humanity people associate with Oscar Insurance. Oscar Health needed to feel mature and credible, but not sterile or overly corporate like traditional healthcare companies. Oscar Insurance has always been willing to speak plainly about what makes healthcare frustrating. That honesty is part of our DNA. The new identity expands the frame, but it does not abandon the directness and humanity that helped us stand out in the first place.

What role do technology and AI play in the brand story?

Technology matters when people can feel the difference it makes. Within Oscar Insurance, more than a decade of work has created a connected health-plan platform that brings together enrollment, billing, provider information, claims, clinical data and member service. That allows Oscar Insurance to build AI into its operations, automate routine work and give teams more time for cases that require human judgment.

Lucie is a separate platform with separate systems and data. We are not transferring Oscar Insurance’s technology into Lucie or combining the two experiences. What carries across is the expertise Oscar Health has developed in using technology to make complex healthcare decisions easier to navigate, so people can feel confident in every health choice they make. Over time, that support can extend into additional areas of wellness and total wellbeing.

For consumers, the story is not the technology itself. It is whether they can understand their options, find care, resolve an issue or make a decision with greater confidence.

How will you know whether the brand strategy is working

Awareness matters, but understanding matters more. We want people to recognize Oscar Health and understand why Oscar Insurance and Lucie Health Marketplace sit within it.

We will also look at behavior. Are consumers finding coverage that better fits their needs? Can they understand and use that coverage more easily? Are brokers and employers able to guide people with less friction? Do people trust these brands enough to return to them?

Ultimately, the brand strategy succeeds when people understand the choices in front of them, know where to turn, and feel confident taking the next step. That is what giving people more power over their healthcare looks like.