The employer plan sponsors that I have met with since 2018 may have noticed that I take a sterner tone when we broach the topic of strategies around preventive medicine, population based health and well-being, clinical or targeted disease management programs. The reason for me is simple. I saw a system fail a family member and it impacted his quality of life when it was all completely preventable.
Read MorePrimary Care Delivered to the Home
Our company recently enhanced our employee benefits program to allow for all plan participants to be able to schedule a Virtual Checkup through our corporate health plan. Since I just completed the process yesterday, I thought I would share some perspectives as a professional employee benefits consultant who works with self-funded plan sponsors and my unique experience.
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What Is Employment Branding?
As our economy gains is footing coming out of a global pandemic, employers are finding that they must now compete in a brand-new world of work. One in which labor is reassessing whether their values, purpose in life, time commitment, total rewards, and the environment aligns with their place of work.
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It Is Always Hard to Say Goodbye ...
WE GET THE POINT! — A PLAN SPONSOR’S GUIDE TO SIMPLICITY
BY STEVE HARRIS, CEBS
One of the things my wife and I have learned over the last year is that our home Wi-Fi is not equipped to handle the bandwidth of two high school students, two home offices, a movie theater, music streaming, gaming, and a gym all at the same time. As our lives have gotten more complex, we’re all craving simplified experiences that are more authentic in nature. It’s one reason why tourism among our country’s national parks is surging.
Overload can also happen to the most well-intentioned firms when they interject too much complexity into their health and employee benefit plan offerings.
EMPLOYEE BENEFITS PLAN COMPLEXITY LEADS TO CONFUSION
Recently, a plan sponsor let us read through a guide produced by one of our competitors, and we found 19 different toll-free numbers. We believed that each time they launched a new point solution, the broker made more money, and it added another layer of complexity into the employee benefit plans. Their employees didn’t need more vendors; they needed help finding help when it was important to them.
Shortlister is an application Holmes Murphy licenses to help track point solutions. They now list over 2,000 vendors that call on our clients as much as they call us. We have some fun with all of this in an ACAP HealthWorks video production, starring two well-cast Holmies.
HOW CAN YOUR COMPANY SIMPLIFY ITS EMPLOYEE BENEFITS OFFERINGS?
Here are a few steps you can take to simplify your approach to health, wellbeing, and employee benefits offerings.
1. ELIMINATE HORSE AND BUGGY HR
The days of the HR department trying to be the exclusive connection point to inform and connect plan participants with a need is as dated as a paper map. An omni-channel approach will be far more effective to connect the end user when its needed as opposed to getting upset with your people for not remembering to use a benefit they saw on page 34 of a 50-page guide during last year’s holiday season.
2. USER EXPERIENCE (“UX”) AUDIT
A UX audit is where you will experience your value proposition through the eyes of your people, who lack experience in the field of employee benefits.
Is the benefit clear on how it can help? What steps must one take to use it? Have we ever asked our people which areas are causing them headaches? Could it all be further simplified?
3. INTEGRATED VS. POINT SOLUTION
Tailored solution providers that provide better outcomes create a strength that is also a weakness since it solves only one problem. An integrated system handles more complexity, but often fails to accomplish what the point solution does better.
We are seeing fast consolidation and interoperability in the market. Astute employers and a good broker can explore the best of both worlds through new Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers emerging in the industry.
YOUR WORKFORCE IS YOUR CUSTOMER
In my “What Your Employee Benefits Guide Says About Your Company” blog, I shared that we can get a sense of how much a company cares for its people by reading through their benefit’s guide. When your customer is your workforce, we have to remember they no longer compare you to a competitor — they compare to the best service they’ve ever had from anyone.
Need help with your employee benefits plans offerings? We encourage you to reach out to an Alliant employee benefit representative and explore more ways we can help simplify the complex through our brokerage and consulting services and subsidiary companies.
Family Photo Album
My father left the YMCA to serve as the first employee and Executive Director of the Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas in 1971.
Read MoreOpioid Addiction – What is a Plan Sponsor to Do?
The leading PBMs and carriers are aligning interventions with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidelines. Here are four considerations you might want to review under your corporate benefit plans:
Read MoreBIGGER IS NOT BETTER…BETTER IS BETTER
If you ever travel to Vail, Colorado, there’s a famous chef named Brian Little who used to work at one of the toniest spots in the Valley. Chef Little realized working nights and weekends towards a Michelin star at one of the largest hospitality brands in the world was not his purpose. He never saw his family, so he decided
Read MoreHow Hospital Chargemaster Law Impacts Employer Health Plans →
This New Year’s Eve hospital systems across the country watched the ball drop in NYC while also preparing their double-dutch secret pricing lists to post online. In industry parlance, this master pricing is known as a Chargemaster. This federal mandate falls under a requirement in the 2010 Affordable Care Act that calls for every service or procedure and it’s associated billing costs to be listed online. Until this week, hospital systems were not required to publish them.
Read More'SKIN IN THE GAME' IS NOT WORKING
The year was 2003 and I was working with a Fortune 500 company in Austin, TX that would be the first large employer (10,000+ covered employees) to launch a consumer driven health plan (CDHP). The savings the company realized from the federally mandated high deductibles would be redistributed in the form of health savings account (HSA) dollars so employees and their dependents could be better stewards of their own money. Employees loved that the money in the HSA was theirs to keep and they would not lose it at the end of the year (FSA) or when they left the company (HRA).
As we flash forward to the 2019 healthcare marketplace, average deductibles for employer health plans have
Read MoreFINAL RULES ON FAITH BASED EXEMPTIONS AND ACCOMMODATIONS
First a bit of background - ACA History
Starting in 2011, Departments issued regulations requiring non-grandfathered gropu health plans and carriers to cover all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and related education and counseling. As a result, many of our clients that objected to these rules on faith-based principles, elected to remain grandfathered under the ACA. If you applaud this position, give credit to a company like Hobby Lobby for taking their case to the Supreme Court where a ruling was made to allow closely held for-profit companies that had religious objections to receive a similar accommodation that was previously granted to religious non-profits.
That Was Then … This .. Just In
Read More2023 LIMITS ANNOUNCED BY IRS
The Internal Revenue Service ("IRS"), has just released their annual limits for 2023. Yes, this is the kind of thing that gets me all excited. It must be hard for the IRS, whose sole purpose is to collect taxes, to furnish us the new limits allowing for greater tax savings for astute health plan participants who like to save money and make the most out of our estate planning. This does not mean we do not believe in paying our fair share ... it only means we do not like to pay more than our fair share.
Read MorePapa Bear and the Goldilocks Health Plan
Before a knee injury, one of my annual traditions was running with my fellow Holmies in the annual Dallas Marathon corporate relay....
The post Papa Bear and the Goldilocks Health Plan appeared first on Holmes Murphy.
Read MoreHealth Plan Analytics Stuck in the Wild West?
Our family loves traveling to Colorado each summer. This year, we passed through Leadville and Minturn, two old mining towns that remind...
The post Health Plan Analytics Stuck in the Wild West? appeared first on Holmes Murphy.
Read MoreLet's Put Some 'Black Friday' in Our Healthcare Spending
Whether it’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday…this year I’m glad to hear some retailers are scaling back their hours so people can...
The post Let’s Put Some ‘Black Friday’ in Our Healthcare Spending appeared first on Holmes Murphy.
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Taming the Big Cat? A Primer on Stop Loss Insurance
As we transition from Halloween to Thanksgiving, we know many of our clients and their service teams are preparing for or have already conducted open enrollment. While most employees appreciate their benefits, they are not familiar with all the work that HR and executive leaders put into what gets delivered at the enrollment meeting. One of the major reasons for providing health insurance is to protect families from a catastrophic financial loss. This is why most employers buy stop loss insurance to cover large claims.
Read MoreSpeaking Out On Transgender Benefits
I recently came across this article, published by Business Insurance with the following headline "Few employers offer transgender benefits". This article, along with the growing news coverage around bathroom use for transgender, prompted me to investigate exactly what percentage of the population here is impacted. According to two of the largest surveys ever conducted on the topic, approximately .3 percent or 700,000 people in the United States identify as transgender.
Read MoreWhat Millenials Crave at Work?
As a latchkey kid that grew up watching the Brady Bunch, the family I wished to emulate had three boys, three girls, Carol and Mike as parents and a maid named Alice. Amidst parents that divorced when I was six years old, me and many of my GenX colleagues learned to fend for ourselves by working through high school and cooking our own dinner. While my mother did her best to support us with dad's alimony check and her high school education, me and my two sisters grew up quickly and were taught not to complain, get a good education and strive for a career that included a Rolex watch at a long-tenured employer.
Read MoreThe Best Food Picked from Trees - A Pizza Farm PSA from Nick Offerman
Those who have completed ACAP Health's (Accountable Care Accountable Patients) metabolic risk reduction program, Naturally Slim, have learned that food is fuel. Hippocrates quote, "let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food", is as true as ever today. His advice then foreshadows now the importance food plays in stemming the obesity epidemic that is leading to diabetes and other chronic conditions. That's what makes sharing this Funny or Die video clip by Nick Offerman a favorite of our staff.
Read MoreSweet Advice from Hippocrates
"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." - Hippocrates When the father of western medicine, Hippocrates, gave us this quote back in the times of Ancient Greece, he was providing one way of solving the public health crisis of our time. I like what Dr. Albert Schweitzer said even better, "It's supposed to be a secret, but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help and encourage the doctor within."
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