Health Savings

Health savings accounts (HSAs) are tax-advantaged accounts designed to help individuals save and pay for qualified medical expenses.

Given a top level understanding of First Dollar's domain objects provided in the Health Wallet Introduction and Terminology, the following section will take you through the steps required to setup your HSA benefit, add it to organizations, and then enroll individuals.

Getting the HSA benefit template ID

One prerequisite to setup your HSA plan is to fetch the HSA benefit template ID. This can be done using the benefitsTemplate query. This will return an array of benefit templates, and you can find the HSA benefit template ID by finding the object with the type property of HSA.

While we are specifically focused on the HSA in this guide, First Dollar is architected this way to allow for maximum flexibility in composing a benefit design across all benefit account types, and even allowing partners to create their own templates to create new types of lifestyle and wellness spending accounts.

Create Organizations

Next, use the createOrganization API to create an employer in our system. This allows you to create unique benefit programs per employer, and enroll employees in those programs as appropriate.

Create a Benefits Program

For each organization, you can then create a top level benefits program using the createBenefitsProgram API.

Create a Benefit

Then, use the createBenefit API to add the HSA to the benefit program for the organization. This call is where you will use the HSA benefit template ID.

You can also set parameters such as the start date the HSA will begin. This way, you can set up and enroll individuals in the benefit weeks ahead of the start date, and individuals will not be able to access their accounts or receive card or marketing communications until the start date.

Create Individuals

Next, you'll create all individuals that need to be enrolled in these benefits. This can be done using the createIndividual API - call this API for each individual who should be enrolled in the benefit.

Required Data for Individual Enrollment

First Dollar's philosophy on data collection is to collect the minimal amount of data required to administer accounts for our users while maintaining compliance. Clients of First Dollar's API should provide the maximum amount of data the client system has available for an individual.

The following data is required for all individuals being added to an HSA benefit:

1. First and Last Name
2. Physical Address (required for card carriers, mail, used for KYC, etc.)
3. Date of Birth
4. SSN

The following data is optional for all users:

1. Mailing address (physical address will be used if unspecified)
2. Phone number
3. Email address

Note, if an email address is provided for a user, the email address must be globally unique (must not correspond to an existing user). If the provided email address is already in use, the request will be rejected as invalid.

Enroll the Individuals in a Benefits Program

Finally, use the enrollIndividualInBenefit API to enroll these individual into the benefits program that was also created earlier.

For HSAs, it is at this point that First Dollar will run KYC checks prior to enrolling the individual in the benefit. If the individual does not pass KYC, partners can use First Dollar's Health Wallet Manager application to upload supporting evidence and manually approve KYC cases, which will then be propagated to the individual user record.

This API call will also queue the process to send a card and marketing communications to the individual, but only on the specified start date of the benefits program.

Making changes

All of the APIs cited above have complimentary APIs to update and make changes to benefits programs, organizations, and individuals. See our full API reference for additional endpoints that you can use to manage changes to an organization's benefits.

There is also an unenrollIndividualFromBenefit API to unenroll individuals from benefits as needed.