Nashville-based Bernard Health, a health insurance advisory firm and developer of BerniePortal and BernieHR, is strengthening its partnership model with financial advisors to help individuals navigate their healthcare options.

"Our firm was built with the mission to be the world's most trusted advisor when it comes to helping people plan for their healthcare," said Alex Tolbert, founder of Bernard Health. "Through strengthened partnerships with financial planners, we're furthering that mission at a time when consumers need guidance more than ever before."

The combination of high costs, a constantly changing regulatory environment, and insurers pulling out of markets is causing worried consumers to turn to financial planners for advice on what to do about healthcare costs. According to Tolbert, these financial planners and advisors not only see healthcare as falling within their scope as fiduciaries, but also as an opportunity to deliver better, more well-rounded service to their clients.

Although financial firms have partnered with Bernard Health for years, the company has now made investments to make those partnerships even stronger - to be an extension of the financial advisor's team. Financial advisory practices can now add a "healthcare extension" with Bernard Health to the services they offer, even enabling Bernard's team of qualified, licensed and noncommissioned healthcare advisors to help clients in the financial advisor's own office.

Additionally, the benefits advisory firm recently launched BernieHR, a new strategic service to simplify the complexity of human resources administration, which provides on-demand support to small- and mid-sized businesses. BernieHR is designed to help businesses that lack a full-time human resources professional obtain "à la carte" options in a full-suite of HR services and will provide additional counsel as needed. The new service is launching with an expanded version of BerniePortal, the company's benefits and HR administration platform.