HFS Highlight: Benefitfocus’ Health Insights provide unique guidance to demonstrate ROI on health benefits

Benefitfocus, a US-based benefits admin platform company has enhanced its platform with the updates to its data and analytics based tool, Health Insights. We last highlighted Benefitfocus for the way in which it is evolving its platform as a potential hyperconnected ecosystem, by bringing together employers, suppliers, consumers, and brokers. In our view, Benefitplace could become a formidable distribution platform for insurance carriers, and is working towards this goal, evidenced by adding Haven Life to its Benefit Catalog in 2020. Now, with continued investments in AI and analytics, the platform provider is continuing down the path to differentiate itself as a modern benefits platform.

Health Insights puts analysis from unique datasets at the fingertips of administrators

Enterprise clients that select Benefitplace as their platform of choice for managing corporate benefits now have access to a series of data and analytics-led value added capabilities. Titled ‘Health Insights’, Benefitfocus is using advanced analytics and AI approaches to help their employer clients proactively tackle the ever-growing challenge of managing healthcare costs. Today, the information that employers and brokers use to select and manage their benefits portfolios are fairly siloed, and Health Insights is putting a stake in the ground to show how data-based decision making can positively impact employer healthcare costs, as well as health outcomes for its employees. The most compelling aspects of Health Insights for HFS analysts are two-fold:

• Finding value in clubbing disparate datasets
  • As a benefits selection platform, Benefitplace has access to enrolment data that can be used to evaluate consumer preferences.
  • Benefitfocus has also integrated predictive clinical data from the John Hopkins ACG System, which shows enterprises their chronic condition compliance status versus the national benchmark.
  • Further, the platform also ports in demographic data and health claims data, including medical and prescription claims, to add more nuanced layers to the resulting analysis.
• Extensive use of reporting, analytics and AI technologies
  • Health Insight dashboards show benefits administrators the total cost of the benefits they offer and their utilization rates, which provide important return on investment (ROI) data for the enterprise.
  • The biggest advantage, in our view, is having a comprehensive set of reports and datasets in one place, enabling high-level visibility into current healthcare costs, as well as drill-down ability to analyze recurring costs and trends, and most importantly, be able to compare your claims data with peers in your industry/company size/region. Having benchmarking data incorporated within Health Insights makes it a highly effective decision-making tool.
  • Critical benefits that Health Insights provides include managing healthcare costs by monitoring fraud, waste, and abuse from healthcare providers and their financial impact on your bottom-line, measuring the impact and ROI of wellness initiatives, improving care compliance, and helping identify potential risks.
  • For employees, incorporating claims data into the enrolment module shows those re-enrolling what their usage has been during the previous year, to guide them through a more data-informed plan selection. Further, Benefitplace uses a machine learning-based recommendation engine to present the most relevant plans to employees, and uses an intelligent assistant to guide easy decision making.

Benefitfocus believes that these analytics solution act as a differentiator in the market, as well as the company’s integration capabilities that keep the data up-to-date and relevant for customers. Using  APIs, the Benefitfocus platform integrates with HR platforms, including SAP SuccessFactors, ADP and Ultimate Software, enabling customers to easily add the benefits of this solution to their main HR platform.

The Bottom Line: The power of marrying enrolment and health datasets and providing AI-led guidance to both employers and their employees makes Benefitplace a forward-thinking benefits platform helping employees, administrators and executives make more informed health decisions.

Benefitplace provides an important value-added solution for corporate benefit administrators. It simplifies the benefits process and presents clear ROI data to support future benefit selection decisions, and improve health outcomes for employees. Enterprises are prioritizing employee satisfaction and retention efforts in a bid to hold onto strong talent. Corporate benefits play an important role to that end. However, benefits are also only one consideration in the overall HR platform. Benefitfocus therefore should market its solutions to potential partners, such as system integrators that implement HR solutions, to maximize Benefitfocus’ sales potential of its platform.