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The 2023 Employee Benefits API Maturity Report

How advanced are benefits carriers in their API journey?

 

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Author: Ideon

Employee Spotlight: Jacob Waters

Posted on by Ideon

At Ideon, we’re proud to have such a talented, diverse team leading the charge for a better and more connected health insurance and employee benefits industry. Our ongoing Employee Spotlight series showcases the people behind our product and unveils what life is like at Ideon. Next up… Jacob Waters, our Senior IT Support Specialist!

Name:Jacob Waters
Department: Business Operations
Title: Senior IT Support Specialist
Location: Colorado

Work

How long have you worked at Ideon?

In March, I will have worked at Ideon for one year. The time has flown by!

What projects are you excited to work on?

I am always excited to learn new ways of automating processes. In the next few months, IT will be tasked with implementing automatic software patching and management. This will help mitigate the need for direct interaction with IT and will be managed behind the scenes.

How have you grown professionally while on our team?

From a previous job, I participated in a HITRUST audit. However, I did not see the process in its entirety. During our recent HITRUST audit, I was able to be fully involved from start to finish. This has enabled me to add more skills to my toolbelt for future projects.

What attracted you to Ideon

The biggest thing that attracted me to Ideon was its people. Prior to being hired at Ideon, I spoke to a few employees that I knew at the company. Based on their experience and my interview, I knew that I was going to be surrounded by a good group of people. I enjoyed my previous job, but once I met with my Ideon teammates, I knew that this would be the best place for me. I could not be happier with my choice. The people, culture and ability to build knowledge without roadblocks is what makes this a special place.

What do you like about Ideon’s company culture?

Working at Ideon has been a refreshing experience. Right from the beginning I was able to develop great working relationships with my peers. Everyone is extremely knowledgeable and always willing to help out. Ideon’s culture allows us to develop solutions without constraints, helping us move forward in a timely manner.

Life

Favorite activity when you’re not working? 

In my free time I enjoy playing basketball with my friends, working on home improvements and landscaping. I also enjoy spending quality time with my family.

Favorite place you’ve traveled?

My favorite place to travel was Nassau in the Bahamas. The beaches looked exactly like a Corona beer commercial. I have an upcoming trip in March to go to Hawaii for the first time, which might bump the Nassau trip to No. 2 on my favs list. That is just a guess.

Interesting fact about yourself… Go!

My brother and I owned a gaming cyber cafe called Tazraz. We held several tournaments for Starcraft, Team Fortress Classic, and Counterstrike.

Employee Spotlight: Tori Osler

Posted on by Ideon

At Ideon, we’re proud to have such a talented, diverse team leading the charge for a better and more connected health insurance and employee benefits industry. Our ongoing Employee Spotlight series showcases the people behind our product and unveils what life is like at Ideon. Next up… Tori Osler, an Implementation Analyst on our Enrollment Operations team!

Name: Tori Osler
Department: Enrollment Operations
Title: Implementation Analyst
Location: Omaha, NE

Work

 

How long have you worked at Ideon?

8 months

What was your onboarding process like?

It was exciting and challenging to learn about the behind-the-scenes processing of insurance data. My background was primarily in human services, so I’d seen insurance, particularly health insurance, from a consumer point of view, but the tech side was totally new! I enjoy learning new things and Ideon was the perfect place to do so. I had an excellent trainer that taught me the mapping and configuration process right away, which has helped immensely as I’ve expanded my skills over the past several months.

Tell us about your day-to-day at Ideon.


I’ve learned a lot in just 8 months! I spend most of my day primarily focused on helping our partners resolve enrollment data errors and discrepancies. I’ve taken an active role in identifying and flagging urgent issues to members of our team, and collaborating with a cross-section of internal and external stakeholders, including brokers, carriers, technology platforms, and Ideon’s product, implementation, and engineering teams. 

What attracted you to Ideon’s mission?

I am drawn to the fact that Ideon helps individuals access their insurance, especially health insurance, through technology. Previously, individuals may have had to wait for months or longer to fix a small problem in the data that could easily lead to a big problem in their health and wellbeing. Having worked in human services, I have seen, for example, what an access-to-care issue can mean for people who rely on mental health medications for otherwise debilitating conditions. It’s not just an issue of not getting their medication for a day or a week; people lose jobs (and then their health insurance) and can have their life trajectory severely impacted by something as simple as an invalid piece of code sent to a carrier.

Those are the types of problems I think about during my day-to-day, when I’m solving urgent issues for members and working with our partners to prevent these types of issues from ever occurring.

What do you like about Ideon’s company culture?

Collaboration is encouraged, and curiosity is rewarded. My experience has been that if I have a question, I can reach out to just about anyone at Ideon and get help — from my manager, from a coworker in Enrollments, and even from our CTO!

Life

 

Favorite activity when you’re not working? 

I love spending time playing or relaxing with my Dalmation-Pit mix, GusGus!

Favorite place you’ve traveled?

Greece (Athens)- amazing historical sites, friendly people, friendly street dogs, and the islands are beautiful.

Interesting fact about yourself… Go!

I geek out over topics involving medicine and especially neuropsychology! The intersection of the physiology of the brain and body and how it impacts our behavior (and vice-versa) is fascinating to me.

Ideon Achieves HITRUST Risk-based, 2-year Certification to Further Mitigate Risk in Third-Party Privacy, Security, and Compliance

Posted on by Ideon

HITRUST Risk-based, 2-year Certification validates Ideon is committed to meeting key regulations and protecting sensitive information

NEW YORK, January 18, 2023 – Ideon, the API platform powering digital experiences in health insurance and benefits, today announced its Enrollment & Member Management API has earned Certified status for information security by HITRUST.

HITRUST Risk-based, 2-year (r2) Certified status demonstrates that the organization’s Enrollment & Member Management API has met key regulations and industry-defined requirements and is appropriately managing risk. This achievement places Ideon in an elite group of organizations worldwide that have earned this certification. By including federal and state regulations, standards, and frameworks, and incorporating a risk-based approach, the HITRUST Assurance Program helps organizations address security and data protection challenges through a comprehensive and flexible framework of prescriptive and scalable security controls.

“Every day, sensitive, personally identifiable employee benefits data flows through our platform and across the benefits industry ecosystem, making the security and protection of this data of the utmost importance,” said Michael W. Levin, co-founder and CEO of Ideon. “By achieving HITRUST Risk-based, 2-year Certification, Ideon is demonstrating to its customers and partners that it’s committed to meeting the highest standards of data protection and information security.”

“The HITRUST Assurance Program is the most rigorous available, consisting of a multitude of quality assurance checks, both automated and manual,” said Bimal Sheth, Executive Vice President, Standards Development & Assurance Operations, HITRUST. “The fact that Ideon has achieved HITRUST Risk-based, 2-year Certification attests to the high quality of their information risk management and compliance program.”

About Ideon

Ideon is the way health insurance carriers and employee benefits providers connect with technology partners to deliver seamless consumer experiences at every stage of the member journey. Ideon is not the websites or apps one uses to choose a plan or find a doctor. It is the infrastructure, the ‘pipes,’ that simplify the complex exchange of quoting, enrollment, and eligibility data between carriers and the technology partners so that they can, in turn, deliver health and employee benefits to hundreds of millions of Americans everyday. Ideon’s APIs transmit billions of data points between InsurTechs and insurance carriers, powering an amazing benefits experience for all. Faster. Better. Awesomely. To learn more, please visit: www.ideonapi.com.

Employee Spotlight: Ali Sarkis

Posted on by Ideon

At Ideon, we’re proud to have such a talented, diverse team leading the charge for a better and more connected health insurance and employee benefits industry. Our ongoing Employee Spotlight series showcases the people behind our product and unveils what life is like at Ideon. Next up… Ali Sarkis, Director of Engineering.

Name: Ali Sarkis
Department: Engineering
Title: Director of Engineering
Location: NYC

Work

How long have you worked at Ideon?

Over five and a half years.

Tell us about your day-to-day at Ideon.

Every day is different, and my schedule pivots depending on team and company priorities. Still, usually, my day starts with a handful of team stand-ups discussing current work and blockers.

Then I spend the rest of my day pairing with team members on their work, writing my own code, researching new technologies that would benefit the engineering department, and joining team and client meetings throughout the day.

How have you grown professionally while on our team?

I started at Ideon as a Senior Engineer, and since then, I have worn so many hats. I was interested in management, so I took the manager’s path instead of the IC (individual contributor) track.

I went from team lead, to engineering manager, to senior engineering manager, to now director of engineering. I grew with the team and because of the team. I learned new skills and sharpened others, like learning Ruby on Rails (coming from a .Net background), building and growing an effective engineering team, being agile and adaptable while keeping the team motivated, engaged, and efficient. The list goes on and on, and I still learn something new daily.

What excites you about the future of Ideon?

When I started at Ideon the engineering team was a team of four. I have seen the team grow to over 23 now and I am looking forward to growing the team even more. I’m also excited about continuing to build the pipes connecting the health insurance and employee benefits industry. Our products are going to change the industry.

What do you like about Ideon’s company culture?

I joined Ideon because of the people and I have stayed for this long because of them too. I love the collaborative culture that we have cultivated. I enjoy working in a fast-paced environment where it is ok to make mistakes, knowing that other team members are always happy to jump in to help.

Life

Favorite activity when you’re not working?

I love to cook, all cuisines but especially Middle Eastern and Italian.

Favorite place you’ve traveled?

Rome, Italy and Beruit, Lebanon are my two favorite cities in the world.

Beirut because it is as close to home as I can get, with great food, fantastic nightlife, and a lot of history.

Rome because it reminds me of Damascus, Syria, and obviously for the great food, outstanding museums, and historical sites. Notice a theme yet?

Interesting fact about yourself… Go!

I travel for food and museums, so instead of lists of places to see and things to do, I have spreadsheets of restaurants I want to try and museums to visit.

Interested in joining our team? Check out Ideon’s careers page.

Shop-by-doc is now ‘must-have’ for leading InsurTech platforms

Posted on by Ideon

HMO or PPO? Copay vs. coinsurance? What’s the cost-sharing structure for out-of-network specialist visits, mental health services, and home health care? Shopping for a health insurance plan is a notoriously painful process — whether you’re seeking individual coverage, choosing between plans offered by your employer, or examining your Medicare Advantage options, it’s often difficult to identify the plan that best matches your specific requirements. And it’s certainly not getting any easier: more carriers are offering more plans than ever before.

Like modern shopping experiences in other industries, the bulk of health plan selection now occurs online, via digital health insurance exchanges of both the public and private variety. For these digital platforms, used by consumers, seniors, brokers, and businesses alike, it’s critical to deliver intuitive, data-driven user experiences that provide full transparency into the rates, cost-sharing, subsidy estimates, and other features of all available health plans. However, a robust plan library, side-by-side plan comparison, and a modern quoting interface are insufficient to meet the needs of today’s users.

Shop-By-Doctor: provider-centric plan selection

To many consumers, there is no more significant determinant than whether a plan offers in-network coverage of their preferred providers, hospitals, and facilities. This has become even more important in recent years, as out-of-pocket maximums have increased and high-deductible plans have gained prevalence. To avoid the potentially high cost of out-of-network care, most consumers begin their plan shopping process with one question: “Which plans cover my family’s doctors and our local hospitals?”

Multi-carrier digital platforms have made answering this question far simpler than when paper SBCs and carrier-specific portals ruled the plan selection and enrollment landscape. Today, many multi-carrier exchanges and state-based marketplaces have integrated shop-by-doc functionality — the ability to filter available plans to show only the options that cover users’ preferred doctors and providers — into the plan shopping process.

Offering shop-by-doc has material benefits. Consumers avoid out-of-network fees and purchase a plan based on what’s actually important to them. Ideon, currently powering shop-by-doc functionality on several leading private marketplaces and state-based exchanges, has found that about 70% of consumers shopping for health plans will add their providers as a search criterion. For health insurance platforms, shop-by-doc is no longer an optional feature — it’s an essential component of a modern, integrated, fully-digital plan shopping experience.

Integrating shop-by-doc functionality into the shopping experience

Despite shop-by-doc’s obvious benefits, there remain some holdouts among consumer and broker-facing platforms. Adding this functionality was, traditionally, a near-impossible endeavor. The industry lacked a centralized, standardized source of provider-network data from which platforms could power provider-centric plan shopping features. Acquiring this information, in a usable format, from hundreds of health insurance carriers was beyond their operational and resource constraints.

But that technical barrier no longer exists. Ideon has transformed shop-by-doc into a simple addition to any existing platform, by building APIs that enable platforms with quoting functionality to integrate shop-by-doc into their system, without acquiring and maintaining the underlying provider-network data. These APIs are a bridge to better user experiences, and, ultimately, better-informed health and financial decisions and a smoother enrollment process for all.

If you’re interested in delivering shop-by-doc functionality to your platform’s users, reach out to learn how Ideon’s data solutions enable tech companies to build robust decision support experiences.

Three ways benefits platforms can leverage the growing popularity of voluntary benefits

Posted on by Ideon

Executives and decision-makers at benefits-technology (BenTech) companies—HCMs, benefits administration systems, HR platforms, etc.—have a tough job: every few years, new industry trends force these vendors to shift their sales, product, and partnership strategies to align with the latest needs of brokers, employers, and employees.

One trend that has dominated the BenTech ecosystem in recent years: the rise of voluntary benefits. While employers have offered core benefits like medical, dental, and vision insurance to employees for decades, voluntary products are a more recent phenomenon. Voluntary benefits, as a category, includes a broad scope of services, including: 

  • long-and-short-term disability
  • mental health support
  • financial-wellness programs
  • identity theft protection
  • accident insurance
  • cancer insurance
  • hospital indemnity insurance
  • critical illness insurance
  • legal services
  • pet insurance
  • life insurance

These products, for which employees pay at least part of the cost, are increasingly a standard component of competitive, modern benefits packages. In 2021, 55% of voluntary benefits brokers reported higher sales compared to 2020 and 54% reported increased enrollment activity, according to BenefitsPro. Further, LIMRA predicts the nonmedical benefits market will grow 20% over the next few years. And it’s not only that more employers are offering voluntary benefits — employee participation is growing, too.

So what’s a BenTech to do? Platforms that simplify the benefits experience for employers and employees—from choosing benefits products to enrollment and administration—will be best positioned to take advantage of the voluntary trend. 

Here are three ways BenTechs can enhance their voluntary experience:

1. Offer the voluntary benefits employees desire. It’s no secret that today’s employees want flexible, personalized benefits packages that supplement core products—medical, dental, and vision insurance—with newer offerings. BenTechs that stay abreast of employee needs and offer the most popular voluntary products will undoubtedly have a leg up on their competition.

And what, exactly, do modern employees want? According to a recent survey by Buck, it’s all about financial wellbeing and supplemental health coverage: hospital indemnity insurance, critical illness insurance, accident insurance, long-term care insurance, and personal loans are among the fastest-growing voluntary benefits. On average, employers offer 12 voluntary benefits, Buck’s survey revealed.

2. Provide decision-support tools for a better enrollment experience. Gone are the days of employees selecting benefits by skimming printed collateral materials. Today’s workers expect an Amazon-like enrollment experience: easy product comparison, tech-enabled assistance at the click of a button, and personalized recommendations based on data and individual needs.

Leading BenTechs have significantly upped their capabilities in recent years, empowering employees to make more informed decisions and better understand voluntary products. PlanSource, for example, offers employees side-by-side plan comparison and helps calculate per-paycheck cost estimates, while its DecisionIQ feature provides personalized recommendations powered by AI and machine learning technology.

3. Focus on operational excellence to make enrollment and administration a breeze. Offer in-demand products? Check. Build an industry-leading, digitally-advanced enrollment experience? Check. But the final step for forward-thinking BenTechs is to make operational greatness and smooth client service core priorities.

A major operational challenge is the transferring of voluntary benefits elections from a BenTech platform to carrier systems, and confirming groups and employees are enrolled accurately. This is an essential task: data errors can cause critical coverage issues for employees, billing problems to be rectified, and, ultimately, reputational harm and client turnover. That’s why many leading BenTechs now leverage APIs to streamline data exchange with carriers. Indeed, according to Guardian, API-enabled benefits administration can save employers up to 200 hours per year and cut down on data errors.

For BenTechs, building a better voluntary benefits experience won’t happen overnight. But there are ways to make serious progress, without using significant development and operational resources. For more information about how Ideon can help, contact us here.

Ideon Releases 2023 ICHRA Map

Posted on by Ideon

Over half of the U.S. is ICHRA-friendly in 2023

Today Ideon’s 2023 ICHRA map is live! This interactive tool highlights those counties and states where the Small Group to Individual ACA health insurance premium dynamics are conducive to ICHRA adoption.

We believe the 2023 landscape was highly impacted by Bright Health’s exit from the individual market affecting 16 states.  Bright has been a price leader in many markets and had Bright stayed in, we expect the number of ICHRA-friendly counties and states would have increased beyond that which is noted below.

Key findings:

  • Over half of the U.S. is ICHRA-friendly: in 26 states, the 2023 Individual Bronze plan premiums are equal to, or less than, those of Small Group.  This is a two state increase from 2022.
  • We are seeing Individual premiums across all metal levels continue to migrate towards parity with Small Group premiums, or be less expensive. In 16 states, the 2023 Individual Silver, and Individual Gold plan premiums are equal to, or less than, those of Small Group.  There was no change for Silver plans and an increase of two states for Gold plans.
  • Well known employer brands (i.e. the Blues, Cigna, UHC and Aetna, a CVS Health Company) continue to expand their Individual geographic footprints covering substantially all counties.  The availability of Individual plan options from these brands gives comfort to employees migrating from group health plans, often sponsored by these very same brands, to the individual market through an ICHRA.

Stay tuned for more insights on the 2023 ICHRA landscape. For information about Ideon’s ICHRA solutions, contact us here.