If you’re standing up a new health sharing ministry — or modernizing one that’s outgrown its spreadsheets — the operational question comes up fast: what software does it actually take to run one?
A quick boundary first. This isn’t a guide to forming a sharing ministry. Your legal structure, your state-required notices, your sharing guidelines, and whether and how you qualify as a healthcare sharing ministry are questions for your attorney and compliance advisors — not a software vendor, and not this article. What we can speak to is the operational side: the software you’ll run the day you’re ready to enroll members and process sharing needs. Get that stack wrong and you’re stitching together five, six, or seven vendors before you’ve shared a single medical bill.
Here’s the stack — and why it usually isn’t one.
The seven systems it takes to run a sharing ministry
1. Enrollment and applications. Online applications, statements of belief and attestations captured with e-signature, household and dependent enrollment, medical questionnaires, and an approval workflow. This is the front door, and it’s the difference between growing your membership and drowning in paper. Bought separately: an enrollment platform like Employee Navigator or B-Swift, or a custom form build.
2. Member management. The system of record — member and household profiles, relationships, statuses, contribution standing, and a full contact history your team can actually work from. Bought separately: a CRM bolted onto whatever administers your program.
3. Sharing-need processing. The engine of the ministry: need intake, guideline application, sharing-eligibility determination, member-responsibility and accumulator tracking, provider bill matching, and duplicate-bill detection so the same need submitted from a member and a provider doesn’t get shared twice. Bought separately: a dedicated needs- or claims-processing system — often the single most expensive line item.
4. Provider bill intake and EDI. Electronic bill intake (837s), clearinghouse connectivity, and X12 parsing so provider bills flow in and read cleanly instead of arriving as paper to key in by hand. Bought separately: a clearinghouse contract plus EDI middleware.
5. Contributions, billing, and payments. Monthly share-contribution billing, member payment methods (card and ACH), provider disbursements, and 1099-MISC and W-9 tracking for the providers you pay. Bought separately: a payment gateway, a billing platform, and separate tax-tracking tooling.
6. Member portal. A branded place for members to submit needs, track need and bill status, manage their contributions, pull digital ID cards, and find their documents — without calling your office. Bought separately: a custom-built portal or a bolt-on module.
7. Communications and growth. Email, SMS and texting, a way to reach members by phone, enrollment funnels, and marketing automations. Ministries grow through enrollment, and the tools that drive it are their own category. Bought separately: a marketing platform, a phone system, and a funnel builder — three more vendors on their own.
Why that’s normally five to seven contracts
Buy those separately and you’re not buying software — you’re buying an integration project. Five, six, seven contracts. Setup fees, per-seat fees, and per-transaction fees on each. Middleware to make systems that were never designed to talk to each other pass data back and forth. And your members’ information — their health details, their financial details — scattered across seven platforms, each its own security question you have to answer for your board.
That’s before anyone processes a single sharing need. It’s the reason so many new ministries end up running on a makeshift hybrid of tools that half-work, and it’s exactly the problem worth solving before you enroll your first member.
Claimaro is all seven, in one
Claimaro is the whole stack in a single platform: enrollment, member management, sharing-need processing, EDI and provider bill intake, contributions and payments, the member portal, and the full communications and growth suite — one login, one contract, one bill. Each ministry runs on its own isolated database, HIPAA- and SOC 2-compliant controls are built in with a BAA on every plan, and a new environment provisions in minutes, not an implementation cycle.
Zero per-claim fees — ever. In a market where needs-processing vendors bill you per transaction, Claimaro doesn’t. Your ministry can double its membership and clear its need queue every day, and your platform cost doesn’t move a dollar. When you’re running on shared contributions, a cost that grows every time you do your job is the last thing you want.
If you’re weighing dedicated healthshare platforms, we put Claimaro side by side with them — see how Claimaro compares. And whatever you’re comparing, the economics tend to decide it: replacing seven vendors with one system, at published pricing from $3,500/month + $5 PMPM with no per-claim fees, is usually a fraction of what the pieces cost apart.
See the stack, and the number
The fastest way to understand it is to see it. Run your member count through our calculator to size it against what a seven-vendor stack would cost you, then book a walkthrough — twenty minutes, and we’ll show you the whole ministry running in one place.