Americans are cutting back at work or leaving the workforce entirely in droves, and there are indications that won't be changing any time soon. As a result, U.S. employers are scrambling for new ways to attract workers and hold on to those they still have. Revamping their healthcare benefits packages is one of their top strategies.
Indeed, benefits like a choice of two or three health insurance plans, paid sick time, and health savings accounts aren't cutting it these days. Today's workers are demanding benefits like tele-mental health services and virtual physical therapy services. Some companies are covering their employees' health benefits in full, even in their own health clinics. This isn't surprising; according to Gallup, some 75% of Americans who get their healthcare coverage through their employer
Rather than try to keep up with the corporate Joneses, however, most organizations should leverage as much of their own benefits data as possible to carefully evaluate their options, select those that promise the most benefit for their own employees, and continuously evaluate benefits performance along the way.
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Here are three ways benefits managers can use the data at their disposal to help design and maximize the right healthcare benefits for their organization's workforce.
Leverage data to continuously measure performance
What conditions are cropping up most often among your employees? How often are they visiting their primary care providers and specialists? How much use of generic drugs versus branded medications are they making? Medical claims and prescription data play an important role in answering questions like these. But benefits managers must dig even deeper in order to craft innovative health benefits packages that meet the needs of current staff and attract new talent.
In fact, about 30% of benefits leaders in a
The message is clear: employers and benefits managers must increasingly look at the whole person in order to identify the most appropriate benefits for their employees.
It's also important not to "set it and forget it" with respect to implementing a healthcare benefits package. The same data used to craft a benefits package can also be used to measure the performance of a company's
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Implement a comprehensive data analytics solution
Admittedly, gathering and analyzing all this disparate data can be a heavy lift for even the largest of human resources and benefits management teams. Only 30% of respondents to the Artemis Health survey believe they are successfully mining benefits and healthcare data to identify what's working, what's not, and what adjustments to make. Fortunately, comprehensive software solutions are available to help companies collect and analyze the wealth of data needed to effectively choose and evaluate healthcare-related point solutions.
The best of these solutions offer out-of-the-box functionality to customize capabilities for unique employer needs. The ability to easily gather and analyze content from external data lakes and integrate external business intelligence tools is key. They also provide benefits managers with the ability to make predictive insights based on employee demographics and comorbidities and make data-informed program management decisions.
Take, for example, a Fortune 500 company that reduced costs associated with the use of branded biologic medications to treat psoriasis. Although employees with psoriasis make up less than 1% of the organization's health plan membership, the company saw its costs of branded biologics to treat the condition rise from 39% of total prescription costs in 2018 to 44% in 2022. As a result, the company has begun offering its employees free access to an at-home phototherapy and disease management point solution.
The same company leveraged the data analytics tool to identify rising costs associated with skin cancer screening and treatment among its employees. The findings led the company to offer a free smartphone-based app that employees can use to simply take a picture of a worrisome lesion and upload it for review by a dermatologist, saving the company in some cases as much as 50% or more in screening and treatment costs.
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Use data to measure ROI
Almost 70% of benefits managers surveyed say that measuring the effectiveness of point solutions is the most challenging part of the
One Georgia-based company is leveraging data analytics solutions to conduct a return-on-investment/attribution study of its company-owned health center. The solution enables the organization to gather, collate, and analyze employee demographics; spending on and utilization of the center's primary care providers; conditions and comorbidities, and prescription spend.
Based on the results, the organization is taking steps to increase awareness of the health center and its services; monitor it for waste and efficacy; implement additional patient/employee surveys to assess movement from the company-owned clinic to community-based clinics; and partner with the clinic to enhance care.
These are tough times for employers; attracting and holding onto top talent is more challenging than ever. Selecting the wrong health benefits package for the wrong reasons has the potential to make it even more difficult. Simply put, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to healthcare, and employers need to leverage all the data at their disposal to make wise choices.
That's not an easy task, but the right data analytics solution has the power to reduce the friction associated with the endeavor, to satisfy a benefits manager's need for actionable data, and to aid the employee's desire to easily access the healthcare point solutions that can best meet their needs.
