How to Build an ICHRA Platform via API: A Practical Guide for 2025
Published on September 09, 2025
By: Zach Wallens
The Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA) market is no longer a niche experiment. Adoption jumped 34% from 2024 to 2025 among large employers, with even small businesses entering the space. That growth is fueling an explosion of new ICHRA platforms—some spun up by startups, others by established benefits and HR technology providers
But here’s the fork in the road: Do you spend 12–18 months building from scratch, hiring engineers, and wrangling carrier integrations? Or do you stand up your platform in weeks by leveraging existing API infrastructure?
This guide will show why API-driven infrastructure is the more scalable path to building an ICHRA platform—and how to think about the functional blocks every platform must deliver.
ICHRA Platform Fundamentals
Every ICHRA platform needs to deliver several essential capabilities, regardless of whether it’s been created from scratch or is powered by APIs. Those elements are:
1. The Employer Experience
This is the front door for companies offering ICHRAs. Employers need to:
- Create employee classes & allowances: Segment workers by compliant criteria (age, geography, job type) and set contribution levels.
- Design the ICHRA benefit: Decide how much funding employees receive and whether to vary contributions across classes.
- Stay compliant: Ensure affordability rules are applied correctly and reporting requirements are met.
- Simplify setup & admin: Integrate with payroll and HR systems, reduce manual data entry, and generate transparent reports on allowances and payments.
2. The Employee Experience
For employees, the platform must feel intuitive and empowering. At its core, this means:
- Plan discovery & comparison: Access to on-exchange and off-exchange individual plans across carriers, normalized into apples-to-apples comparisons.
- Decision support: Tools, filters, or even AI-powered guidance that helps employees choose the right plan based on budget and coverage of doctors and prescriptions.
- Frictionless enrollment and payments: Seamless submission of applications to carriers, with real-time status updates, as well as easy premium payment processing.
- Ongoing support: From concierge services to clear visibility into premium payments, employees want confidence that they’re covered.
3. The Infrastructure Behind the Scenes
The polished experiences for employers and employees are only possible because of the infrastructure humming in the background. A strong ICHRA platform needs:
- Real-time plan design data: Always-current rates, benefits, and contribution structures for individual market health plans—normalized and refreshed automatically so employers and employees can trust what they see.
- Accurate provider data: Comprehensive, standardized details on doctors, specialties, and networks to ensure employees know which plans cover their preferred providers.
- Enrollment connectivity: Carrier integrations that automatically submit applications, validate eligibility, and confirm enrollment without manual file transfers.
- Payment automation: Built-in tools that route and reconcile premium payments to carriers on time, with full transparency and auditability.
- Security and reliability: Enterprise-grade infrastructure with SOC 2 certification, HIPAA compliance, and the scalability to handle open enrollment surges without downtime.
These layers together define a complete ICHRA platform. The employer and employee experiences differentiate the front end. But it’s the infrastructure that makes them actually work.
Why APIs Matter
Building benefits software the old way meant relying on manual data collection and batch file processing. This made platform development challenging, and created delays and inconsistencies that could leave employees without coverage during critical moments.
But in the ICHRA space, most leading platforms have developed core functionality using pre-existing APIs. These ICHRA platforms process data in real-time, offering instant eligibility verification, immediate plan quotes, and a smooth enrollment experience. They handle thousands of requests concurrently and cut the risk of an employee being unable to access their benefits when they need them most.
Key API Components for ICHRA Platforms
Every ICHRA platform relies on a set of core building blocks. These APIs do the heavy lifting behind the scenes, turning complex data into a smooth experience for employers and employees.
Health Plan Data Normalization
Carriers deliver plan data in dozens of formats. An effective ICHRA platform must unify this into a single, consistent model, ensuring that employers and employees always see accurate, comparable rates and benefits.
The API value: APIs normalize messy carrier data automatically, so your platform can deliver clean plan comparisons without maintaining hundreds of custom mappings.
Real-time Eligibility Engine
ICHRA rules are complicated and change every year. An eligibility engine applies affordability rules, employee class rules, and ACA requirements automatically, handling scenarios like mid-month employee changes, COBRA transitions, and other complexities. The system has to account for carrier-specific eligibility requirements that vary between states too.
The API Value: APIs keep your platform compliant out of the box, saving months of development time and ensuring your customers always have up-to-date eligibility and affordability calculations.
Premium and Subsidy Calculator
ACA affordability calculations involve complex math, and they change annually. The calculator must process household income, apply federal poverty level thresholds, and account for geographic variations in pricing to ensure employers meet contribution requirements.
The API Value: APIs like Ideon’s calculate the minimum employer contribution in real time, applying FPL thresholds and returning both employer- and member-level results.
Carrier and Marketplace Connectivity
Submitting employee plan elections to insurance carriers is one of the hardest parts of ICHRA administration. Without APIs, it means manual data entry and file transfers. Where possible, modern platforms rely on automated carrier integrations that handle applications, eligibility checks, and enrollment confirmations.
The API Value: APIs give you advanced, plug-and-play connections to multiple carriers, eliminating the need to build and maintain integrations yourself.
Payment Processing
Moving premium dollars from employees to carriers is complex and high-stakes. Payment APIs automate these flows, reconcile transactions, and provide full visibility into payment status.
The API Value: APIs automate payments at scale, reduce errors, and give your platform transparent auditability—without custom payment rails or manual reconciliation.
Data Validation
ICHRA platforms rely on accurate plan, provider, and enrollment data. Without strong validation and monitoring, errors can lead to employees enrolling in the wrong plan, payments being misapplied, or employers making non-compliant contributions.
The API Value: The best APIs enforce accuracy at every step—validating carrier data and enrollment submissions, and surfacing real-time error visibility. This ensures your platform delivers clean data and builds trust with employers and employees.
Build vs Buy: Finding the Right Balance
The reality is that most ICHRA platforms take a hybrid approach—building in areas where they want to differentiate and relying on pre-existing APIs where efficiency and scale matter most. The key is knowing where to invest engineering resources versus where to leverage proven infrastructure.
Here’s the trade-off: 67% of software projects fail due to poor buy/build decisions. And the cost isn’t just in dollars—a company that spends 18 months building core ICHRA capabilities from scratch also loses 18 months of growth in a market expanding at 30% year over year.
| Factor | Build In-House | Use API Platform |
| Time-to-Market | 12-18 months of development | 6-12 weeks of integration work |
| Up-Front Cost | $200,000+ in engineering | Usage-based pricing |
| Ongoing Maintenance | Continuous data updates, bug fixes, and carrier relations | Managed by the API provider |
| Carrier Coverage | Ingest data from each carrier individually; manually handle enrollment submissions | 300+ carriers via one integration |
| Development Resources | Product leader and several developers for 12+ months | Small integration team for 1-3 months |
| Scalability | Each new carrier and function requires additional builds | Add carriers and capabilities with no incremental effort |
| Data Accuracy | Must build carrier-specific validations for plan data and enrollments | Automated validation of all data and real-time visibility into errors |
While building from scratch offers control, API-driven solutions offer a much better balance of efficiency and resource allocation—while freeing your team to focus on the parts of the platform that truly differentiate.
How Ideon Accelerates Your ICHRA Roadmap
Recent customer implementations have shown the speed and efficiency gains that come with IDEON, with organizations launching their ICHRA platforms in 6-12 weeks compared to the 12-18 month timeline typically required for building the same capabilities internally.
Here’s how:
Single API Covering All Functional Blocks
IDEON’s comprehensive API eliminates the need to build and maintain dozens of individual carrier integrations. A single connection gives access to plan information, eligibility verification, enrollment and payment connections, and more.
Built-in Affordability Calculator
With an integrated, pre-configured ACA affordability calculator API that automatically updates with regulation changes, IDEON helps you build tools to ensure employers offer ICHRA-compliant contributions and plans.
Enterprise-grade Security
All data processing happens within IDEON’s SOC 2 Type II certified and HITRUST-certified infrastructure, removing risk and giving ICHRA platforms the confidence to leverage a third-party API.
Developer Resources for Rapid Implementation
IDEON offers comprehensive developer documentation, sandbox environments, and technical support, allowing teams to build proof-of-concept implementations in days rather than months.
Implementation Checklist
To successfully build your ICHRA system with IDEON, follow this checklist:
- Secure API access and Sandbox Environment: Request API credentials and access the developer sandbox. Here you’ll find test data that allows experimentation without risk.
- Map Employee Census to API Endpoints: Connect your HRIS fields (employee ID, job type, ZIP code, salary) to Ideon’s standardized endpoints. This enables accurate rating area, class, and allowance assignments.
- Integrate Plan Options Feed: Pull in real-time plan and rate data across carriers so employees can compare options with confidence.
- Test Affordability Outputs vs Sample Cases: Ensure your platform applies ACA rules correctly by running tests, especially edge cases like part-time workers and mid-year changes.
- Configure Employee Classes and Allowances: Set up segmentation rules using class management tools. Define allowances by employee type, geography, or other criteria that align with your ICHRA strategy.
- Review enrollment and payment workflows: Study IDEON’s documentation for enrollment submissions and premium payment processing. Plan how these workflows will fit into your platform’s user experience and operational model.
- Go Live, Monitor, and Iterate: Launch your platform, but remember to monitor and log to track performance. Use analytics tools to find opportunities to optimize and ensure better experiences.
Conclusion and Next Steps
API-first approaches, like those you get with IDEON, allow companies to offer timely access to ICHRA benefits while leveraging proven, compliant infrastructure. Rather than spending 12-18 months building, your team can focus on offering unique value propositions that mark your platform out in a rapidly expanding market.
The choice is yours: spend over a year wrestling with carrier integrations and compliance requirements, or launch your ICHRA platform in weeks with battle-tested infrastructure that scales with your business.
FAQs on Building ICHRA Platforms Through APIs
Q: How do you build an ICHRA platform with APIs and carrier connectivity?
A: Building an ICHRA platform via API means implementing unified endpoints, real-time carrier data exchange, and normalized data models, eliminating custom integrations and manual uploads. This enables interoperability across 300+ insurance carriers with a single scalable solution.
Q: What is the IDEON ICHRA Map 2025, and how does it impact integration projects?
A: The Ideon ICHRA Map 2025 highlights the states, carriers, and markets most favorable to ICHRA adoption. For integration projects, it helps platforms and carriers prioritize where to launch first, ensuring technical efforts align with the biggest market opportunities.
Q: What is the role of the IDEON API in ICHRA administration?
A: ICHRA administration platforms use the Ideon API as a single source for carrier plan data, real-time eligibility, pricing, enrollment, and payments. It abstracts legacy complexity, supports rapid onboarding, and maintains 99.9% uptime for enterprise-grade benefits administration.
Q: What are the technical steps to set up an ICHRA platform using API-driven workflows?
A: Setting up an ICHRA platform with APIs involves configuring employer and employee data, enabling carrier and marketplace connections, and integrating health plan data, affordability calculations, enrollment, and payment endpoints. This creates a real-time, automated workflow that replaces manual file handling and accelerates platform development.