Effectively Manage Healthcare Spending

When making recommendations on a company’s insurance coverage, it is important that a benefit consultant targets these three components: employee engagement, vendor selection and utilization, and plan design. To manage healthcare spending, each of these areas need to be overseen effectively.

1. Employee Engagement: Employees can be purposefully engaged with relevant yet manageable education during the enrollment process and throughout the year to ensure that they understand relevant terminologies such as deductible, benefit maximum, coinsurance and maximum out-of-pocket expenses.
2. Vendor Selection and Utilization: Benefits consultants will help employers understand the types of vendors being proposed and why. They will assist in identifying what each specific company needs and what their employees will most broadly utilize so the resulting comprehensive package is well-received.
3. Plan Design: During the selection process, benefits consultants may suggest changes to the type of overall structure of the plan design, like the network that is utilized, or the amount of the deductible. These moderate tweaks in plan design can result in time savings and an improved bottom line.

Employee Engagement

Greater transparency builds trust in an employer by presenting information in easily digestible ways during enrollment. Decision-support tools help engage employees while they’re enrolling. Ultimately staff can make better healthcare spending decisions and use their comprehensive benefits package more fully.

When the enrollment program provides sample claims it educates employees and they can use the provided data to make wise decisions for the coming year. They can then begin to plan for visits to specialists and learn what the real costs and benefits to them could be.

Vendor Selection and Utilization

Employers have a wide selection of vendors to choose from, so it’s important to bear in mind the following three cost-savings categories in terms of their impact on the company and its employees:

• Third Party Administrators (TPA) can make access to coverage easier for employers. They can help reduce or control costs while remaining competitive. They often provide a better customer experience and maintain quality control to measure results on an on-going basis.
• Provider Networks enable you to manage prescriptions, control the pricing of service provided to staff, and the settings in which staff can obtain service.
• Medical Management focuses on identifying common prevalent ailments in order to provide wellness incentives that focus on improving overall health thereby potentially reducing the number of claims.

Health Plan Design

For an employer, the main challenge is to roll-out changes that will provide the desired results. Working with experience-based health plan modeling tools uses analysis to bring great clarity to your process. The financial impact the planned change would have on healthcare spending for both the company and its employees can be predetermined when the correct planning tools are used.

Analysis also helps to visualize projected savings more clearly by presenting how selected variables and inflation will project-out to the bottom line. Using these analysis tools can save time since results are available quickly as plan scenarios are tested just by changing the variables.

Experience both cost and time savings during benefits planning for your company. Contact benefEx today to discuss how to tackle this with simplicity.