In 2025, employers can’t afford to ignore digestive health benefits

Heart disease and diabetes – two top chronic conditions in the US – are directly impacted by diet, and digestion has a two-way relationship with tooth decay, another leading chronic condition. Even vision is affected: the gut produces retina-specific T-cells that are implicated in degenerative eye conditions – and impacted by the gut microbiota.

Some employers have already recognized that benefits that take a GI-first approach to wellness and health care can lead to outsized gains in employee health, wellness, and productivity while also helping to manage benefits spend.

And while cost savings is a compelling reason to give GI benefits a look, it’s far from the only reason. Let’s look at three other timely reasons digestive health benefits can deliver outsized value in 2025.

1. In an era of benefits consolidation, ROI matters more than ever

During the early years of the pandemic, many employers took a “more is more” approach to benefits, striving to attract and retain employees in a competitive talent market.

Today, the tides have changed. Costs are rising, and employers are more focused on consolidation, ensuring that every benefit they offer delivers value to a large portion of their workforce.

In this context, GI benefits are particularly attractive. As much as 40% of the US population experiences painful or debilitating digestive symptoms. In our own research, we’ve found that those who are regularly affected report being less productive at work – or even missing work altogether – during flare-ups.

GI-first benefits can help, particularly when they’re available via digital platforms and integrated with existing health care plans.

To understand why, it’s helpful to consider how traditional health care benefits treat GI issues. Typically, a member starts their diagnosis journey with a visit to a primary care provider (PCP) who may or may not have any nutrition or GI-specific training. This may trigger tests and referrals with significant wait times, making for a painfully long diagnosis and treatment journey. For example, it’s common for people with IBS to have symptoms for more than five years before getting a diagnosis.

With a digital platform designed to deliver GI care, however, members can get expert guidance within days (and often sooner). Crucially, this care isn’t limited to guidance from gastroenterologists, which is important given that we’re experiencing a serious shortage of these specialists nationally.

2. The gastroenterologist shortage means GI care is more elusive via traditional benefits

In 2025, the US is projected to be in need of about 1,630 gastroenterologists, or just shy of 10% of total practitioners. To make matters worse, half of the practitioners we do have are nearing retirement age even as the US population as a whole gets older and thus more likely to need GI care.

Already, the shortage is causing access issues. Wait times to see a practitioner can be long. When painful GI symptoms flare up before patients are able to see a specialist, they often end up in the ER. Digestive complaints are, in fact, a leading cause of ER admissions. And in about two-thirds of digestive-related ER cases, the patient is admitted to the hospital.

GI-first benefits, then, must go beyond covering visits to GI specialists. But that’s actually a good thing: in my conversations with gastroenterologists, I hear one refrain over and over: a patient waited for months to get in to see them, only for the physician to realize that their issue could have been addressed by a nutrition coach or registered dietitian.

For those patients, ready access to these practitioners is a must. Digital GI benefits platforms are an excellent way to provide that access. When these platforms can connect providers and members via telehealth, access to care and health outcomes improve further, making care more available to the most socially vulnerable among us, including those who may live in a care desert, have limited access to transit, or have caregiving duties of their own that make it hard to leave home.

The very best GI benefits will also incorporate AI features – or at least have them on the roadmap. One promising use case is to use AI on the back end to optimize provider workflows. By bringing together data from disparate sets, this kind of AI can offer a kind of “easy button” for providers, suggesting the most up-to-date care protocol and letting the human practitioner decide whether to accept the recommendation.

AI-enhanced care will be crucial for scaling personalization in a field evolving as fast as digestive health.

It’s also a risk factor for chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and some types of cancer.

The Biden Administration has proposed changes to Medicare that would cover GLP-1s prescribed to treat obesity. If enacted, those changes would make GLP-1s available to more than seven million additional Americans; however, it’s unclear whether the incoming Trump Administration will sign off.

Regardless, though, GLP-1s will remain popular for those with employer-sponsored insurance. But these drugs come with side effects, the most common of which are digestive. In fact, 7% of those on GLP-1s for weight loss abandon the treatment because of the associated GI symptoms.

Management of those symptoms is possible with appropriate intervention from GI practitioners – and in the interest of employers who want the big-picture health benefits that can come with sustained weight loss. Here again, GI-first benefits can have a disproportionately large impact on overall health outcomes.

Health starts in the gut, and GI benefits deliver outsize value

Too often, employers are faced with benefits that are as fragmented as the health care system itself, a state of affairs that has contributed to ever-increasing costs.

Benefits advisors can help employers both manage those costs and enable better employee health outcomes by educating them on the ways GI-first benefits can impact all other aspects of employee wellness while potentially reducing overall health care spend – and by pointing them to partners with robust evidence that their platforms deliver results.

Bill Snyder is the Chief Executive Officer of Cylinder, a leading digital digestive health company and sponsored benefit, and has over 15 years of experience in health care technology and leadership. Prior to Cylinder, Bill built and led national sales efforts and led the health plan practice at Virta Health. Previously, he spent 11 years with Humana, serving in various leadership positions, including Vice President of the company’s Greater Chicago region.