Why We Started Leap

Leap was founded to solve a problem hiding in plain sight: patients who depend on life-sustaining infusion therapies are forced to navigate a system that makes care harder and more expensive than it needs to be. We work with self-funded employers, consultants, and health plans across all 50 states inside one of healthcare's most expensive, least understood categories: specialty infusion. Most benefits teams don't feel the size of that problem until the bill lands. By then, the medication has already been administered, the claim has already been processed, and the money has already been spent.

Specialty infusion drugs make up less than 2% of prescription volume in the United States. Despite that small share, they account for more than half of all specialty drug spend, and the gap keeps widening: infusion costs are growing at nearly twice the rate of overall medical spend.

For self-funded employers, that shows up as a concentration problem more than a volume problem. Roughly 2% of members typically drive up to 15% of total medical spend, almost entirely through a category most plans have very little visibility into.

It is a transparency problem

Most infusion therapies are reimbursed under a decades-old model called buy-and-bill. A hospital or provider purchases the medication, administers it, and submits a single bundled claim to the health plan. Employers see one allowed amount. They don't see what the drug actually cost, what the administration fee was, or how much of that total is provider margin. The number on the page is the only number they get, and there's no line item to audit it against, even a sophisticated benefits team can't separate the drug cost from the markup sitting on top of it after the fact.

It is a reimbursement problem

That opacity isn't incidental, it's structural. Provider markups on specialty infusion drugs can exceed 400%, and because the entire claim arrives bundled into a single J-code or Q-code, there's no way for an employer to separate the drug cost from the markup sitting on top of it. The carrier that negotiated the rate has little incentive to unbundle it. The provider capturing the margin has even less.

Increasingly, it is a member experience problem

Members are often left to navigate one of the most complicated care journeys in healthcare on their own: prior authorizations, benefit questions, scheduling, provider coordination, and finding a clinically appropriate site of care. None of that complexity shows up on the claim. It shows up in missed appointments, delayed treatment, and members who quietly fall behind on therapy because no one helped them coordinate the pieces.

The cost problem and the member experience problem were never separate issues. They're symptoms of the same broken system, and that's what brought Leap's founders together.

Three founders, one conclusion

Hani Elias, CEO, saw the problem from the angle of incentives. Members were navigating a fragmented, confusing experience while employers absorbed rising costs, and neither better pricing alone nor a better member experience alone would fix it, the two had to move together. That conviction traces back to his career: after starting at McKinsey & Company's healthcare practice, he co-founded Lumere, a venture-backed healthcare technology company that helped hospitals reduce unwarranted clinical variation and supply chain waste before its acquisition by GHX in 2020. Hani holds a JD and MPH from Harvard.

Rob LaHayne, Chief Commercial Officer, spent 20 years in employer healthcare, including as CEO of TouchCare, a care navigation solution for employers, before co-founding Leap. Across that career, specialty infusion kept surfacing as one of the largest and least understood drivers of cost, a category where employers were spending millions with almost no visibility into what they were actually paying for.

Amir Sharif, President, understood what it would take to make that actually work. His background building consumer healthcare companies, including leadership roles at Care/of (acquired by Bayer) and Tend, and founding Kins, meant he knew that solving this wasn't just a pricing problem. It required an operational model that could deliver a consistent experience nationwide: implementation, care coordination, provider engagement, and ongoing member support, all held together by one team.

Each founder arrived at a different piece of the same problem, and landed on the same conclusion: the cost and the experience were never separate issues, they were two symptoms of one broken system. We believed employers deserved to know what they were paying for. We believed members deserved someone to guide them through one of the most complex experiences in healthcare. And we believed those two things, transparency and genuinely good member care, should work together instead of competing with each other. That belief became Leap.

What that looks like in practice

Leap partners with employers, health plans, consultants, and TPAs across all 50 states to help members access clinically appropriate infusion care at home or nearby. Drugs are billed at true acquisition cost, with no buy-and-bill markup, and every member is paired with a dedicated, licensed Leap Care Guide who stays with them throughout treatment, from benefits review and prior authorization through scheduling, provider coordination, and ongoing support. One person owns the experience from start to finish.

What a Care Guide actually does

Every Leap Care Guide is a licensed clinician, typically a registered nurse with years of experience across acute and chronic care, often spanning infusion therapy, surgical care, and complex care coordination. For the members they work with, a Care Guide is a single point of contact for the full course of treatment, not a different nurse each visit.

That means coordinating the infusion schedule around a member's life instead of the other way around, checking in regularly to see how treatment is going, answering questions about medication and side effects, and staying in close communication with the rest of the care team so nothing falls through the cracks.

That continuity is deliberate, not incidental. It's a simple operational choice, one dedicated person instead of a rotating cast of providers, but it's the difference between a treatment plan on paper and someone who actually knows what matters to the person living it.

Employers can see the drug cost, the administration fee, and the markup on every claim, not one bundled number. Members get personalized support through every step of treatment. And care decisions stay clinical: the same drug, the same protocol, decided by the prescriber, not by which site of care captures the biggest margin.