More than half of U.S. population accesses health benefits via employer provided-benefit plans, and employers collectively spend over a trillion dollars providing them. A significant amount of this money has been wasted due to poor utilization and a lack of understanding by employees on how to effectively utilize these benefits. Thanks to advances in population health management solutions, employers are now beginning to take advantage of technology to deliver smarter health management.
Health management platforms have the potential to increase the utilization of benefits programs and improve population health outcomes, while also enabling employers to increase the return on their investment. Let’s take a deeper look.
An engagement crisis
The fundamental problem plaguing employer-sponsored benefits is low engagement. Most employees do not take advantage of the programs available to them because they are unaware of, or lack easy access to them, and as a result, they are unable to create impactful results for themselves.
As an example, an employee may want to quit smoking, and their employer may offer a smoking cessation program but they do not know it exists or how to access the solution. Whatever the case, these behaviors drive up costs for employers even when they offer solutions.
So why don’t employees engage with benefits, like nutrition counseling or smoking cessation programs? It is largely due to a lack of engagement due to a poor user experience. In an era when people have become accustomed to personalized messaging, elegant user interface, proactive customer service, cross-channel communication, and on-demand information, the user experience for employee benefits remains mired in an outdated (i.e. paper-based) one-size-fits-all approach.
One issue is disjointed benefits rollout and communication. Too many companies carry out the benefits enrollment process through a one time, piecemeal experience. Employees receive heavy packets containing confusing forms, obtuse plan descriptions, and different enrollment instructions from multiple vendors.
Though the information for the panoply of benefits programs (healthcare, vision, dental, and wellness programs, etc.) is almost always available online, employees have to log-in to multiple sites to access it.
The process involves a prohibitive amount of friction delivered in a large batch that requires them to digest a large amount of information in a short time thus, most employees lose interest and motivation. They don’t learn all the options available to them nor do they engage with programs that could meaningfully improve their health and reduce risk factors.
In addition, employer-sponsored healthcare programs face a problem of incentive. In an ideal world, “being healthy” would be motivating enough, but in a world that values immediate gratification this is a hard behavior to help employees visualize the benefits of.
Incentives can have a powerful impact on changing behavior, but implementing incentives remains a challenge. Tracking health behavior, program compliance, and ensuring proper payout (or lack thereof) for participation in programs can involve a huge amount of work and coordination to do right.
Employees aren’t the only ones coping with a poor customer experience for benefits programs. On the employer side, companies receive data associated with the programs they pay for, or contribute to, but it is generally conveyed by each vendor in a different format. Moreover, employers typically lack the ability to benchmark the data.
This means that despite their exorbitant spending, employers have little to no ability to gather data, analyze it for insights, and use those insights to optimize their programs. Furthermore, many employers will use 3rd party benchmarking data, which—while helpful to understand the market—does not take into account the unique nature of that employer’s benefit design and the fundamental goals they have put in place.
Driving value with a Health Management Platform
As mentioned above, a majority of healthcare spending is preventable. Almost 70% of total healthcare spending goes toward treating chronic conditions caused by smoking, obesity, and substance abuse, which are related to lifestyle choices. This problem has more to do with access to care than it does about health. Employers are failing to create a positive “customer experience” for their employees that engages them with the available resources.
Health management platforms (HMPs) are emerging as a powerful solution. They use technology to help employers overcome the communication and engagement gaps that prevent employees from meaningful engagement.
Health management platforms streamline the management of health and wellness benefits. They bring all information and interactions surrounding health benefits into one centralized digital hub and deliver content and solutions in an easy to digest, simple format. All communication is personalized, customized and tracked, and optimized for maximum engagement. This dramatically simplifies rollout and access for both employers and employees.
Furthermore, employees have one place where they know they can find the information they need whenever it is convenient for them as well as a way to learn about care available to them. The messaging can be data driven through Biometrics or claims data to ensure that the information delivered is relevant to the problem.
Low engagement is magnified when employees have to search through stacks of paperwork, track down a pamphlet they received in the mail, or give up their lunch break to learn. HMPs prevent important messages from falling through the cracks and automate personalized follow-ups to keep employees on track.
In addition to addressing the communication problems, HMPs also make health benefits more personal. No two people are alike when it comes to health. They deal with different predispositions, illnesses, behaviors, and life circumstances that all affect their health. As such, providing every employee with the same information is a waste of their time, as well as the employer’s.
Manually, this degree of personalization is not feasible, but HMPs make it possible at scale due to cost and logistic issues. These platforms analyze data, such as biometric screening, claims, and personal questionnaires, to target employees with the right health benefits offers at the right time.
All the friction is gone. Employees don’t have to sort through mountains of irrelevant paper because the relevant promotions are delivered to them. The marketing mantra that “Better targeting leads to better engagement,” is just as true here.
And since HMPs hold a wealth of health data about every employee, implementing incentives becomes significantly easier. HMPs track clinical data and program participation across multiple benefits providers, so they can help employees track their progress, which itself fuels motivation.
Then when employees hit certain milestones or goals, the HMP makes it easy for employers to pass on that information to financial services, so they can pay out the appropriate incentive. Finally, incentives can be matched to the specific needs of the employee population and can be customized as necessary. The ability to segment is limited only by the number of input fields in the data file!
All this data and insight not only helps employees engage with their health, but also helps employers understand what they could do better to optimize their spending. For example, if an employer discovers that 40 percent of employees are prediabetic, they can take steps to bolster a diabetes prevention program, and deliver employee specific content based on actual need, not educated guesses. Or perhaps they learn from clinical screenings that their “healthy heart” efforts have not had an impact, and change the program accordingly.
In today’s world, not using a health management platform is tantamount to leaving money on the table. Employer healthcare costs are skyrocketing at an alarming rate. On top of this, unhealthy workers cost businesses $153 billion a year in lost productivity, according to a Gallup Poll.
Employers just can’t afford to pay massive amounts of money for health benefits that employees don’t use. It’s time to break away from the old ways of delivering benefits and start creating a positive “customer” experience that involves clear communication, access to information, targeting, follow-up, incentives, and more. Health management platforms can reduce population health risk factors and thus cut corporate healthcare costs. Everybody
Keith Serrano , VP of Strategy, Keas, is passionate about helping HR and benefits leaders dramatically increase benefits engagement, drive down healthcare cost, and reduce population health risks. Soranno previously led sales at HelloWallet, a leading financial wellness firm owned by Morningstar. Prior to HelloWallet, Soranno held consulting roles at Mercer Health & Benefits, where he primarily focused helping employers design benefit strategies to drive better outcomes. Soranno is a Certified Employee Benefits Specialist (CEBS) from The Wharton School and is a Registered Employee Benefits Consultant (REBC) and Registered Health Underwriter (RHU) through the American College
Date: October 19, 2015