The Labor Market and Economy Have Changed. As An Employer, What Are You Doing To Evaluate Your Second Biggest Expense?

Aside from salary, employee benefits are the number one tool to attract and retain employees. Is your employee healthcare benefit program a competitive advantage or a compounding and frustrating expense? Regardless of the size of your organization or medical practice, it is important to periodically evaluate your employee benefits offering. This article describes some highlights as to how to do this, and what you could potentially evaluate.

Are you familiar with the concept of using predictive data analytics to evaluate employee benefits? You may or may not have access to those, but you should ask your benefits broker. If you are relying on carrier reports that look backwards, then it is difficult to bend the cost curve going forward. This is how predictive data analytics work: By utilizing a much larger data set than just your own population, typically through a data warehouse, you can predict future claims costs before they even happen. Once you know the areas of concern and cost drivers, it opens up hundreds of strategy possibilities to lower your costs, e.g., Medications, Education, Consumerism, Plan Design, fully insured vs self-insured, stop loss levels, etc. In real time, you can make changes so that your health plan runs at its most efficient and optimal level. Fortune 500 companies have been doing this for 10+ years, but in the middle market, you need to find the right broker partner to help you navigate the appropriate solution.

Once you “take back the math” from the carriers (who are not looking out for your best interest), you gain negotiating leverage and open doors to modern strategies to help lower costs, increase benefits, and enable your employees to gain an overall higher perceived value of what you offer.

In addition to data and analytics, it is important to get a grasp on how your current strategies and ROI stack up against other high performing employers. Some of our clients have recently gone through an advanced benchmarking analysis with a consultant in this area to gain insights into what other top performing employers are doing with their healthcare program:

• Predictive data and analytics
• In-house underwriting and actuarial analysis
• Communication and education strategies to increase perceived value
• Administration of benefits
• Employee advocacy
• Turning their employees into better consumers of healthcare
• Compliance and HR risk management

We have heard from this consulting firm (which has worked with our clients and clients like ours) that they have found over 40 financial levers that were otherwise unknown. It is always an eye-opening experience. If this type of analysis would be helpful, please reach out to us.  We would be happy to connect to chat further.

For further information contact us.