Addressing the Realities of Technologies vs. Human Support to Drive the Employee Benefit Experience

Health Explore insights from Employer Benefits News' 2024 study on employer and employee perspectives regarding healthcare costs, benefits technologies, and navigation ease. Discover why only 44% of employees feel confident about healthcare costs and why HR remains the go-to for benefits questions, highlighting the continued need for human support. What you'll learn Learn how leading employers are enhancing the health benefits experience and supporting diverse populations. Discover new technologies and platforms providing personalized health benefits. Explore strategies to control costs, manage digital health solutions, and access reliable data for benefit strategies.

Transcription:

Announcer (00:09):

We have one fantastic panel that I'm really excited to help introduce here for a second. The topic is Addressing The Realities Of Technologies Versus Human Support To Drive The Employee Benefit Experience. All I read there is humans versus robots, right? But anyways, no, I'm really excited to bring up these three amazing speakers. Going to talk about some really important items here, how we merge the human support with technology as well. So first up, we have Veronica Knuth, she's a CPO, or Chief People Officer at Quantum Health. We also have, go ahead, give her a round of applause. Yeah. We also have Leslie Pilliod, Vice President of Benefits and Wellbeing at Target Corporation. Glad my wife's not here to know that you're from Target. And then we also moderating this amazing panel is Jen Liptow. She's a Director of Research with EBN.

Jennifer Liptow (01:20):

So all of us are actually humans. Just to clarify if that was in question for my slides. Yeah, that's probably Okay. So welcome as noted, we're going to be talking about addressing the realities of technologies versus human support to drive the employee benefit experience. And Veronica and Leslie, please introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about your roles, if you would.

Leslie Pilliod (01:48):

Thank you. So excited to be here. I'm Leslie Pilliod. I'm the Vice President of Benefits and Wellbeing for Target. Target. I hope you know it well and shop it often. But those of you who might not know Target is a US retailer. We have over 2000 stores in all 50 states, 50 distribution centers, and we have ways for our guests to engage with us, both store, app and online. I have the pleasure of leading our benefits team, which focuses on the health and wellbeing of over 400,000 employees, which we call team members. That is very hard language for me to not do. So I'm going to say team members and their families, and that is through financial programs, health programs, wellbeing programs, and in really strong partnerships with partners like Quantum Health. We bring that to life.

Veronica Knuth (02:41):

And I am Veronica Knuth. I'm the Chief People Officer at Quantum Health. For those of you who don't know Quantum, we are the founder in the healthcare navigation space. After 25 years in business, we support 500 clients, Target being one of them, and more than 3 million of their health plan members. The business model for Quantum is actually very simple. We become the point of contact for team members as well as their providers, which puts us in the very center and at the very beginning of all healthcare journeys and all healthcare decisions. In my role, I lead all things human resources for we call our employees Healthcare Warriors. So we have about 2,400 healthcare warriors. I have all things facilities as well. And I also have the team of Warriors who supports the quantum health navigation for our employees. So I consider myself a client as well as an employee of Quantum Health. Wonderful.

Jennifer Liptow (03:54):

A personal side note, I have never spent less than two hours in a target. That's what I like to hear. I'm sure I'm not alone. Okay. So let me talk about the research a little bit. That is going to be sort of the backbone of what we're talking today. We're actually pulling research from three different studies, which is pretty cool. We've got the state of healthcare study that we did across employers and employees where we spoke to them about different things going on in the healthcare industry, trends, et cetera. We also did a study specifically with Quantum Health where we talked to people about redefining engagement and that was to HR professionals. So we've got a lot of data to draw on here, and before we really dig into that data, I want to ask Veronica to talk to us about why Quantum was interested in partnering with us on this research. Quantum sponsored our big state of healthcare research, and then of course we have the opportunity to work with them recently on another study.

Veronica Knuth (04:49):

Yeah, I think this was our third collaboration, correct. And so it's been really great on behalf of not only our clients, but also all of us who are at the front and center of trying to figure out healthcare trends, the healthcare industry, where's it going, and quite frankly, how do we stay on top of supporting our employees with the best and most innovative benefits, but also how to do it in a way that is fiscally responsible, meets the culture of our businesses. So anything that we can do independently and collectively to make that a little bit easier for all of us, I think is just a tremendous, tremendous effort and partnership. So we appreciate

Jennifer Liptow (05:41):

Absolute, we appreciate EBN, very much appreciate the partnership. Alright, let's dig into the data. Our first section is on balancing increasing costs with the benefit experience. Hey, guess what costs are going off? What? No, it's true. 83% of people said in the survey that we did that their costs had gone up in the last year and 79% expect their cost to go up again next year. So this is an ongoing, not a fad, a trend. And we see also there we are. Next one, where are the costs going up? Short answer everywhere, but specifically on prescription drugs, premiums, specialty care, cancer care, things like that. And this is impacting larger employers to a greater degree. That being said, I want to turn to Ms. Leslie and ask you, target is a very large employer as noted. How are you guys balancing costs with your desire to offer innovative benefits experiences?

Leslie Pilliod (06:43):

I mean it truly is a balancing act and I think all of us in the benefits space, especially over the last two years have been talking about cost, cost, cost. I had a call this morning before the conference, what are 2025 healthcare trends going to look like and what are we going to do about it? And that's really the balance that we're trying to figure out is what's controllable as an employer, what's uncontrollable and then what can you do that still preserves what we refer to as the team member experience or the patient experience. And that's where we see a lot of the different players come in to say, I can help you take the control out of the system or I can take the cost out, but how are you also going to improve the outcomes for the member? How are you going to give them a beneficial experience?

(07:28):

And then we layer that in with what are our team members actually telling us. We do a lot of listening throughout Target. We have an annual employee survey and then we have weekly pulse checks at various points in that we'll get really specific on benefits questions. When we did our value study last year, we heard number one, no matter the audience that we looked at, stores, distribution centers, headquarters, their number one concern or the things standing in the way to their wellbeing was medical cost. When we probe deeper, we found out it's because they don't know where to engage in the system. That led us down the journey to partner with Quantum Health to say, okay, we actually feel really good about our healthcare ecosystem. We think we have the right partners in place, we have the right health plans, we have the right point solutions, our members just don't know it.

(08:17):

And by putting in that navigation so that we're taking out the problem from the team member having to say, where do I go and giving them one place to go and letting the warriors at Quantum Health take over to get them to the right solution, that is where we are seeing the cost decrease. We're seeing it decrease for Target, we're seeing it decrease for our team members and we're hearing that it's improved member experience and that's really the whole goal of this is to reduce the cost while preserving and hopefully improving that team member experience side.

Jennifer Liptow (08:49):

No, absolutely. Alright, our next topic, which you were just speaking a little bit about, healthcare literacy and employee education. This obviously comes up quite a lot in the research that we do. Some interesting insights here. We ask them how confident did they feel about understanding their insurance? So while they felt fairly confident that they could figure out who was a doctor in network, some of the other things they didn't feel so confident about were costs coverage and claims. And let's see here. And to speak further to that, obviously even four in 10 didn't know what their out-of-pocket costs were going to be when they went to the doctor, which is kind of a big deal in terms of your ability to go. So to that end, we're going to start with you Leslie, and then we're going to go to you Veronica. How does Target approach educating its employees on your various wellbeing and health benefits? And you talked a little bit about this, but what have some successes and learning spend from these efforts?

Leslie Pilliod (09:45):

I think there's a lot of work to still be done here and we look at the diversity of our team member population with 400,000 employees across all 50 states. We look like the US population. So where you see areas of the country that struggle with different health conditions, we see it in our population, in our data. We also know that there is a low amount of health literacy and so we have a barrier for our team members to get the help that they need to even know where to start. As an example, a big learning for us is we've always had a wellness reimbursement program in place. And so we would seed account dollars in our healthcare plan by our employees going to get preventive cancer screenings or an annual exam. So you do that, you get the dollars in your account, you're good to go.

(10:38):

We thought when we were probing deeper, what we found were our, our hourly employees were not taking those steps, so they were not getting the dollars in their accounts. And when we started focus groups to go and understand, they said, I know the preventive care is free, but I don't know what's going to happen at that appointment and I'm afraid I'm going to get a bill. So if I'm not having any money in the account, they wouldn't even take the step to go get care. So we actually changed the dynamic and we started seeding the account for our non-exempt population to entice them to go get that preventive care. They had that safety net that if something was billed as diagnostic during that appointment, they had the dollars in account. Just a huge aha to say the barriers are very real and the barriers are leading to lack of access.

(11:26):

And so what can you do to remove those barriers? And sometimes it might just be for a segment of the population, but taking the step to do so to meet them where they're at. And then that's really the other side of it is knowing that everyone is going to learn in different ways. Everyone wants to navigate the system in different ways. And so our partnership with Quantum Health, we have, it's telephonic, there's a digital solution. We do mailers to homes, we do table talkers and posters in our distribution centers like it's 1984 because that is what the team members need. There's different versions in the ways they want to be engaged with. And so we're really working to meet 'em where we're at. And then the Warriors take over from that point, learn their style, figure out the way they want to engage and then create that relationship. So it allows for that personalized approach, which is not easy in a large population.

Jennifer Liptow (12:19):

It's not easy. And it is just something we were speaking about a little bit ago about that importance of personalization and sort of meeting people where they are and giving them what they need. To that end, Veronica, tell us a little bit more about how Quantum is helping employer clients in this regard with their navigation and their care coordination. I'm particularly interested in speaking a little bit about the human and tech combination and how you're able to achieve some of those outcomes.

Veronica Knuth (12:44):

Sure. To Leslie's exec point, there are many of us in the room who are benefits experts, but there are many of us that really aren't. And we just don't know what we don't know until we need to know it and then we want to be able to know it right away. And so I wanted to pull out some of the EBN research that showed that 45% of employers reported that they're drawing on healthcare navigation services to support the employee engagement the way that Leslie spoke about. And 42% of employers are now offering access to healthcare navigation, concierge, or advocacy services as a fully paid company benefit because they want the employees to actually be engaged in their healthcare choices. I think the important thing to remember is that not all healthcare navigation is the same. There are a lot of digital solutions out there, but if you don't know what you don't know, having a digital option, whether it's on your phone or on a website, that's still very different because I don't know, it's like Wikipedia.

(13:54):

I can find all kinds of information anywhere. And so having the human touch I think is really important. The right navigation partner will offer multiple modalities. I think the other thing that is really important is integrating the entire ecosystem. So Leslie, you work with 14 different partners in a way to provide a super comprehensive set of benefits offerings to your employees. But that's 14 things that as an employee I need to know and I need to do and I need to know when to engage, which a healthcare navigation partner can pull all of that information together in a way that's consumable and in a way that they can say, Hey, you need this and then let's talk about this. Have you engaged here? Let me work with you on the phone while you are setting this up. Can you set it up on your phone?

(14:53):

Can you set it up on your computer or let me send you the instructions on how to set it up after we get off the phone. I think the other thing that's really important is that we're going to follow it all the way through. So I might call with a question about my benefits, but then I also need to know who are the providers that I can work with. Do you have providers that might need my specific demographic or my specific need? And then also working all the way through to utilization management and care coordination. So it's important to pull all of those pieces into the ecosystem so that you can give your employees all of the things that they need to be highly successful in whatever they need and whatever their journey is.

Jennifer Liptow (15:41):

Well, yeah, benefits are only so good if people actually use them, aren't they Speaking more to ROI and engagement basically when we looked at this, we found out that engagement's a key priority for them, right? Because again, you could be offering the best benefits in the world, but if nobody's using them, they're not really benefiting from them. But only two out of 10 are saying that ultimately they're having the best case scenario across the spectrum. We saw that people are making some progress in these areas, but they're really not where they want to be when it comes to engagement. So this question is actually for both of you, and we'll start with you Leslie. I'd like to get your perspectives on how can HR and benefits leaders address this gap? What can be done to better educate and engage employees to maximize that ROI on those investments that you're making? So we'll start with you.

Leslie Pilliod (16:36):

It's such an important element of the work that we're doing. And back to the conversation about cost earlier. I mean, shocker, my budget is not getting bigger what I know, I know. And so it's what can we do with what we offer today? But on the other side, we actually feel really good about what we offer today. The ecosystem feels really solid. So we took a step back over the last year and said, this year we're going to amplify. And so we had a full strategy around just amplification of what we offer today, and we got very crystal clear on what we labeled as our marquee offerings. Marquee offerings were benefits within the total portfolio. So even outside of healthcare that we said, this is what we're going, we stand for this, these benefits most closely align with our culture, which is to care, grow and win together.

(17:26):

And we feel a lot of pride in the benefit space of bringing that culture of care to life. And so we put these benefits on a pedestal and went all in on an amplification effort. And to my comments earlier, really did the approach to say we're going to meet 'em where we're at and we're going to create many different ways to engage in the audience. Quantum is one of those because quantum, we get the double whammy. If you can get 'em to Quantum, you can actually get 'em to all the point solutions too. And so instead of talking about, Hey, you need this for sleep, you need this if you're diabetic, you need this for weight loss, you need this for hypertension. We just said for all health, go to Quantum. We actually took the partnership and we named our warriors and our teams who answer our target calls the Bullseye Health spot.

(18:10):

And that was a little bit to the comment that the presentation earlier about trust, that was Target putting its logo on something to say, we believe in this and we believe in it for you and it's an investment in you. And so anything that comes up in the health space, your call or your email or your digital solution is the both eye health spot, they'll get you to the right place. We took it further to say, you don't even need to ask for what you need. All you have to be able to say is, I am struggling with this. Fill in the blank. Let the warrior take it from there. And that really gets us to the momentum of, okay, I might've called in about a claim, but that claim was actually for a prenatal appointment and now you're getting me connected to our maternity program.

(18:55):

That's the flow that we're seeing happen. And it does mean that we have gone quiet on some of our other benefits programs. If you're not a marquee offering, you get one hit a year through the engagement team, which is a partner group to my benefits team to say, we're going to go out and educate on this, but everything else is through that marquee program offering. We also knew the importance of the people involved and that's our HR and our leaders in our locations because there's only so many things. You're going to listen to an email from my team on or the mailer that came to your home and then you're putting in the recycling. But to hear it directly from your HR leader or your manager and to have a team member component or a testimonial tied to it, that's the game changer for us. And so we did go and educate our leaders on these six distinct programs so that they are advocates for us out in the field.

Jennifer Liptow (19:46):

That's fantastic. And I agree with you. Our HR person is actually here at this event and I've known her for 20 plus years. And so to be able to go to her and have her discuss something with me is very different.

Leslie Pilliod (19:58):

It makes a difference.

Jennifer Liptow (20:00):

Ms. Veronica, tell us more about Quantum and what's going on related to this.

Veronica Knuth (20:05):

Sure. So one of the things that we did very early in our evolution of the company is we saw also a trend to say we were only as good as we could be when a health plan member actually called us. So we said, what can we do to proactively up those odds? So one of the things that we did, and we call it realtime intercept, is we said, you know what? It's okay to be the one number on the healthcare card for the employees, but if we're also the one number on the healthcare card for the providers, the providers will call us and have questions about, Hey, what's the coverage? Or I need a prior authorization. Our system can pull that in and immediately flag to our target team or to any of our pods that there's an event going on with an employee. So even if that employee didn't call us, it gives us the information to be able to call them to be able to say, Hey, we understand that you might be going or you are embarking on a healthcare journey and we want to help you.

(21:22):

We want to talk to you about what questions you might have around your coverage or around your care or around the next steps. And so that actually lets us get involved in what might be a cost more than a hundred days before the first claim is actually received. And so we've created this two-Way partnership, so it's not all on the health plan member, it is also on us to be able to say, Hey, we know this because we have seen the information that's coming through. We have 89% household engagement with our health plan members. And so last year alone we had 104 million interactions, 80% of those are in person. And so that creates a real opportunity to be able to impact care, impact the health outcomes and impact cost. And to the ROI question, we're the only healthcare navigation company that literally boxes up our entire book of business and all of our information and we send it to a third party firm to say, tell us that we're actually delivering on the ROI that we think that we're delivering upon. And I think that that's another critical component with all of the partners that you work with. ROI is a tricky thing, and we get a little suspect when somebody says, I can give you a return on your investment. It's important to be able to really understand what that ROI calculation is.

Leslie Pilliod (23:07):

I think just to build on that really quickly, another differentiator though of having that navigation support is the proactive piece. The warriors have been through this with people they have helped in the past, so they even know what's going to be coming a month, two months down the road. The example I would point to is the integration into our mental health EAP with Spring Health. So if someone called in because they're about to start supporting a spouse or partner in a cancer journey, that warrior is very well prepared to say you're about to become a caregiver like you've never been before. Do you know, have access to free mental health services?

Veronica Knuth (23:44):

That's right.

Leslie Pilliod (23:44):

And here's how you get into that. To be able to do that early on in the front end is just such an important differentiator in that integration moment.

Veronica Knuth (23:53):

Yeah, agreed.

Jennifer Liptow (23:54):

It's a little bit like you don't know what you don't know, but the Warriors do, but they do. So I'm struggling with X, but I don't know, I have never struggled with X what's coming.

Veronica Knuth (24:03):

That's exactly right. And to be able to have an expertise like that is, I mean, one of my favorite things about our company model is every single day we publish compliments from our clients to literally the entire company. And so every day I probably get five to 10 compliments from real people who are experiencing real things. And because they called in, they have just a little more confidence, a little more education, they feel a little bit better, and they know that they have a lifeline whenever they need it.

Jennifer Liptow (24:48):

That's huge. Geez, time is ticking on us. Let's see. Quickly, we'll go through this one and then we have another couple slides and I want to give us time to wrap up growing fatigue around point solutions. We'll just ask you quickly, Leslie, about this one because one thing that we found in the research that we did is a lot of people offering these, but they're only getting modest engagement with them. What is your strategy related to these digital health points and how do you think about ROI related to them?

Leslie Pilliod (25:16):

Yep. I mean, first and foremost, the first question we'll ask any point solution coming in is tell me how you will integrate with Quantum because that's a non-negotiable for us. That's going to continue to be our front door. And so if they're not able to integrate with Quantum, it's probably not the right solution for us because we need that central point. The other side of it is what is the differentiated team member experience? That is how we make all our decisions as the team member at the center and how are you going to help them and their families improve their wellbeing? And then I'll also say as team member survey, we spent a lot of time on team member sentiment, and if it's not working for our team members, we go find a solution that'll deliver a better outcome. That's just the crux of it is that voice of the team member is so critical and who we bring into the ecosystem.

Jennifer Liptow (26:04):

Absolutely, and I'll just let you comment on that quickly as well.

Veronica Knuth (26:06):

Yeah, I mean we work with 700 point solution and benefit vendors, so we integrate with all of them. We do have preferred partners that we've worked with for years across a variety of clients. So we can even help with who are the ones that continue to provide the best ROI have the best healthcare outcomes, have The technology requirements that you need are the true integration partners, not just with Quantum Health, but across the benefits ecosystem.

Jennifer Liptow (26:41):

Wonderful. Next up, let's talk about AI and tech essentially. So we've spoken a little bit about tech already, but let's talk a little bit about AI specifically. So in the recent studies that we've done, we found that while there's generally some positive views about what AI can do and there's concerns and so forth, but I'd like to get both of your views on this at a high level. Basically anything new going on at your organizations that impacts healthcare benefits engagement. Talk to us a little bit about what's going on with AI at your places.

Leslie Pilliod (27:18):

I would say as an employer, it's something that is very much top of mind for us and a balance again, right? There are elements of it that are really exciting. There's questions that we have as well. Target as a company is very much leaning into it from a guest experience perspective. We just announced that we're putting what we're calling stores companion into all of our 2000 stores, which is for our target team members to have in the palm of their hand to help our guests and to help them navigate through the store and ask questions. And it is an absolute game changer from a business perspective. So if you take that and apply it to the benefits space, what I see it doing is giving us an easier way to create a personalized experience. It will get information to our employees faster, and it will continue to be that balancing act of when are you going to use that AI and when is it going to be that human interaction piece that is just not going away for us? It is. So that's the journey that we're on as we figure out where does the AI stop and the human takes over? And that's questions that we have of all of our partners as they're on their own AI journeys and are looking for those roadmaps to say, how are we going to integrate it into our systems and where are we going to push the envelope

Jennifer Liptow (28:33):

As the human? I approve Veronica.

Veronica Knuth (28:37):

Yeah. I would say the exact same talk track, right? I talked about last year we had 104 million interactions that when you can take the power of that, that makes your digital solutions better to better enable self-service, it makes our employees better because we can give them things like next best and it gives us better data to send back to our clients around what is happening and what is working and what can we switch up to make better. So on full on with ai. But having said that, 80% of people still call us. And when it comes to healthcare, I don't think that trend is going to change. People need humans when they're afraid and when they're confused and healthcare creates that in spades.

Jennifer Liptow (29:30):

I have a robot vacuum. I've never called it when I was scared. Alright, looking ahead, what are you both most excited about when you think about the future of benefits? We'll start with you and then you, of course,

Leslie Pilliod (29:44):

It's all of the words that we've said today, but primarily personalization. I think when we look at all of the advancements in the digital space, and quite frankly throughout Covid, as we saw the patient shift their mindset about digital solutions and be more open, that has been such a huge unlock for us to get more personalized answers directly into our team members' hands. And so I just see that continuing to accelerate in this space. I'm so excited for healthcare trend curves to go down. I'm going fad, not trends, wishful thinking. We hope wishful thinking. But I think as we continue to walk that very tight balance between controlling costs but still investing in the team member experience, the digital solutions are our unlock. And to be able to do that, especially sitting in a chair at a large employer, and I just think there's so much innovation in this space, it makes me very excited for the health outcomes that we'll get from it, quite frankly. I also am excited

Veronica Knuth (30:48):

For us, we're super excited that next year we will roll out healthcare, not healthcare navigation. We roll out pharmacy navigation. We are assuming that pharmacy is on a trend, unfortunately not a fad, and we think we can help bend that trend if we apply some of the same navigation capabilities in the pharmacy space. So we're super excited about that. So I can stop calling

Leslie Pilliod (31:12):

The team about that.

Jennifer Liptow (31:13):

Yes,

Veronica Knuth (31:14):

Yes.

Jennifer Liptow (31:16):

One second. Okay, we're out. Alright, so we did it. I just want to point you guys to a QR code and to a report that is online, the State of healthcare editorial report that we did sponsored by our friends at Quantum. Take a look, check it out. It has a lot more of the data from those two reports, so we'd love to have you see that. Thank you so much to both of you for coming and chatting with me about data and other things, and thank you to all of you for coming so that it wasn't just the three of us talking to ourselves.