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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.

The health insurance and benefits industry has a data problem

Posted on by Ideon

In today’s world, data quality drives results—for good or bad. And for all the progress that’s been achieved harnessing data in the health insurance and benefits ecosystem, data problems are rampant.

We speak to you from the trenches, which is to say that Ideon is in the business of not only data connectivity, but also data accuracy. And in our experience, about 10% of employee enrollments have existing data problems—from incorrect social security numbers to inaccurate effective dates—that can and often does cause significant issues for members, employers, and carriers.

The fallout of poor data throughout the ecosystem includes: 

  • Members are arriving in doctors’ waiting rooms, only to be told their coverage is not in place. Scenarios like these are all too common. And while these problems are solvable retroactively, they cause undue frustration and time-wasting for members.
  • Employers are paying for coverage for employees who have long ago jumped ship, when termination is not done properly. And new employees may resent their employer when their benefits experience is rife with coverage issues.
  • Brokers and consultants are often responsible for ensuring coverage is intact. They also may be the ones charged with entering enrollment data into a broker portal or enrollment platform. So when there’s a data issue, they often bear the brunt of the blame. Aside from fielding calls from irate HR managers, brokers often take home lower commissions when enrollments are incomplete owing to data issues.
  • Carriers have been forced to set up costly systems and processes—such as large customer service operations—to deal with the consequences of poor data quality. Bad data can also mean significant premium leakage. And importantly, while many look to insurers to solve all data problems, it’s impossible for them to do so without the help of all the other entities involved.

Bottom line: The industry’s “dirty data” problem is pervasive, with detrimental ripple effects at scale. Consider: In our estimation, nearly 9 million employees in the U.S. could have a coverage issue.

What’s being done? Not enough. Many constituencies in the industry see data issues as unavoidable and insurmountable, resigning themselves to addressing the symptoms, not the disease.

We get it: These issues are daunting. They’ve been institutionalized to a startling degree. But with industry-wide collaboration, they’re also eminently solvable.

At Ideon, we have some thoughts on how this can be done. You can learn more about them here.

Employee Spotlight: Jess Slabaugh

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… Jess Slabaugh, Sales Director, InsurTech.

Name: Jess Slabaugh
Department: Sales
Title: Sales Director, Insurtech
Location: Knoxville, TN

Work

How long have you worked at Ideon?

Six months. I started in the Spring of 2022.

What was your onboarding process like?

Everyone was so welcoming and excited to see Ideon growing. Ideon is made up of so many collaborative individuals with deep industry knowledge and technical ability, which made my onboarding process extremely informative and valuable. I was able to meet all our department leaders and most of my peers and collaborate on strategy almost immediately.

What do you like most about your job as a Sales Director?

I’m really proud of the solution we put out in the market. Digital Transformation is not easy, but it is necessary, and I get to help companies think strategically about how they accomplish this every day.

What attracted you to Ideon’s mission?

Over the last decade, I’ve somehow become the person that my friends call to answer their insurance questions and help them with annual enrollment. Insurance is so complicated and I loved the idea of working for a company who wanted to simplify it.

What do you like about Ideon’s company culture?

Our employees are a mix of people with and without insurance backgrounds. The combination creates a perfect balance of understanding the industry challenges and pushing the boundaries on the status quo with modern technology.

Life

Favorite activity when you’re not working?

I’m a sucker for a DIY project!

Favorite place you’ve traveled?

Istanbul, Turkey or Dubrovnik, Croatia. It’s a tie!

Interesting fact about yourself… Go!

I like to renovate houses! I’m on house number 4 and have 2 rental properties in downtown Knoxville.

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

Decision Support Tools Are Modernizing the Employee Benefits Experience

Posted on by Ideon

Here’s how leading carriers and third-party platforms guide employees through their benefits journey with decision support technology.

It was inevitable.

The application of data, predictive analytics, and an intuitive user experience to legacy plan selection, enrollment, and year-round engagement processes is a benefits industry game-changer whose time has come.

From choosing the right benefits package to finding high-quality, cost-effective healthcare, today’s employees expect technology to help them make better benefits decisions. Combining data with advanced digital experiences, modern carriers and a new generation of technology platforms are doing precisely that.

To better understand the challenges and opportunities posed by decision support technology, John Emge, Senior Vice President, Carrier Sales at Ideon, recently moderated a webinar featuring three industry experts who are immersed in improving the employee experience through decision support tools: Dan Murdoch, CMO at Nayya; Jill Schlofer, 2nd VP, Implementation and Enrollment at The Standard; and Travis Symoniak, Senior Product Manager, Group Benefits Enrollment at Securian Financial.

In a briskly paced and engaging webinar, the four discussed:

  • The evolution from simple decision trees to advanced, data-driven experiences
  • The data powering decision support platforms
  • What’s driving increased employee demand for benefits decision tools
  • Lessons learned developing and deploying decision support tech
  • The future of decision support

Below we share five of the most actionable insights from the session.

You can watch the full webinar here.

1. Decision support must be an experience

Decision support should encompass an entire ecosystem that engages, educates, and provides recommendations before, during, and after the enrollment process, said Symoniak.

Decision support platforms today can leverage customer-disclosed data to make recommendations that are hyper-personalized, offering employees a strong and empowered understanding of what types of benefits they should pick and — just as important — why. “Whether I’m trying to plan for a voluntary surgery, or my kid’s braces, there is this accumulation of unique circumstances that we all experience,” Murdoch explained. “Benefits need to fit our unique mental, physical, and financial situations.”

To attain that level of personalization, employees must have a level of trust around sharing their data, and employers must follow all privacy and security best practices. But the upside is considerable. “The more you give, the more you get,” said Murdoch. “

It’s also important, Schlofer said, to circle back and help the employer understand whether they made the right choices of benefits for their employees.

2. Decision support gives employees confidence they’re making smart, informed choices

Benefits are the single most important financial decision we make each year, explained Murdoch. They are an essential tool for risk mitigation and planning for the seen and unforeseen. It’s critical that employers offer decision support that empowers employees.

The concept of demonstrating benefits and claims scenarios to employees is extremely powerful, Symoniak said: “We have invested in allowing employees to customize different claim scenarios and put themselves in others’ shoes. When you have a fall, or you hit your head playing softball, what does that claim process look like? What is the payment going to look like, what are you actually going to use those insurance products for?” Employees come away feeling confident they’re making smart, informed choices.

3. Decision support must extend beyond enrollment

Symoniak said the next step in the evolution of decision support is to extend it past periods of enrollment and qualifying events. The future is year-round engagement, as employees are shopping for medical care, getting a recommendation, and getting additional support.

Decision support should become the “go-to” for employees, employers, and brokers when employees experience important changes in their lives, notes Schlofer.

Murdoch noted that consistently evaluating the employee benefits experience is essential to building a best-in-class offering: How are you evaluating your strategy? How are you reviewing employee feedback? The composition of your workforce? How are you choosing your carrier and reviewing their plans to build a holistic offering?

4. Recent market changes are driving demand for decision support

“Two or three years ago there was not this level of interest in decision support,” noted Symoniak.

Indeed, the current labor crisis and rising inflation are major factors in the growing demand for decision support.

Employers are trying to figure out how to attract and retain the best employees, Schlofer explained. How can you use benefits to your advantage? In the recruitment process, help an employee understand what benefits choices they might have if they were to come on board.

Murdoch agreed: “It is absolutely to your competitive advantage to bring benefits decision support to recruitment and hiring. Hiring managers can tell candidates that the company has put together a best-in-class offering, and you don’t have to memorize all the options — we have a platform that helps inform your choices.”

Schlofer explained that inflation is also a factor: Employees should spend more time making these decisions, which can have a critical impact on their personal finances. Now is not the time to drop your benefits because you believe you can’t afford them.

Murdoch noted the economic advantage of decision support to employers. “This is definitely not the time to cut the number of benefits and the amount that’s being spent. But there is an opportunity to spend more intelligently across the entire spectrum of your workforce. Using decision support to identify the right plans for the right people for the right reasons can be economically advantageous to the employer.”

5. The future: A holistic approach to benefits

The industry will continue to move past the legacy driven, challenging dynamic of the traditional benefits selection process. Predicted Murdoch: “I see the future of decision support hitting all the major categories that are required to inform the best recommendations, taking into account lifestyle, habits, and health history. Employers will see ROI on such a holistic approach.” Further, he explained that a best-in-class benefits experience will increasingly feel familiar and intuitive, a step-by-step experience that feels to the user like, for instance, Amazon or TurboTax.

Symoniak said in order to achieve a holistic, year-round approach to decision support, it will be crucial to continue breaking down barriers to linking data to carriers. “We are going to need more real-time integration across the industry to support benefits decisions. Carriers need to partner with benefits administrators and third-party administrators to get additional information. It’s the topic of the time,” Symoniak said. “Yes to more APIs!”

 

For more insights into how decision support tools can elevate the employee benefits experience, watch the full webinar here.

Employee Spotlight: Zach Wallens

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… Zach Wallens, our Director of Content & Communications.

Name: Zach Wallens
Department: Marketing
Title: Director of Content & Communications
Location: New York

Work

How long have you worked at Ideon?

Around 3.5 years — I started at Ideon in March, 2019.

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

Every day is different, as I’m involved in many different marketing functions. My responsibilities range from developing content—such as blog posts, webinars, customer interviews, and whitepapers—to drafting social media content and assisting with press strategy and customer-facing communications. Most of my projects require collaboration across several internal teams, and I also work closely with our external partners at a marketing agency.

How have you grown professionally while on our team?

Three things come to mind, and they’re connected: industry expertise, confidence, and opportunity. I joined Ideon having never worked in the health insurance and benefits industry. But over the past 3+ years, I’ve embraced the challenge of educating myself on the industry’s numerous stakeholders, their unique technical issues, and trends in this evolving, complex ecosystem.

Naturally, that acquired knowledge bred confidence. Having a deep understanding of our industry, from both a technical and business perspective, is empowering. It’s allowed me to confidently raise my hand and say, for example, “this message will resonate with our audience,” and “this customer has a powerful voice around industry trends… let’s feature them in upcoming content.” Gaining that underlying knowledge is really a building block—it’s a prerequisite for creativity and content ideation.

Lastly, as our marketing team has expanded from three people to around seven, I’ve had more resources, freedom, and support to experiment and develop outside-the-box ideas.

What attracted you to Ideon’s mission?

When I was seeking a new job, I had a few main requirements: I wanted to work at an early/mid-stage technology company that had massive growth potential and, if successful, would make a difference in people’s lives. Ideon checked those boxes. Health insurance and employee benefits impact almost every American’s physical, financial, and mental wellbeing—I was immediately drawn to solving challenges in this industry.

What excites you about the future of Ideon?

Our potential. If Ideon achieves its long-term goals, we will have fundamentally improved how millions of people buy, understand, and experience health insurance and other benefits.

What do you like about Ideon’s company culture?

Collaboration, knowledge sharing, and open-mindedness. I’m constantly working with various internal stakeholders across the organization to meet our collective goals. And as Ideon has grown—from 35 employees when I started in 2019 to now about 100—we’ve hired incredibly talented people with decades of benefits-industry experience. Those coworkers have been invaluable to me, transferring their wealth of knowledge and acting as sounding boards for my content ideas. We’re also a highly open-minded company, accepting and valuing new ideas and input from our entire team.

Interestingly, our internal culture matches what we ask of our industry: transparency, information sharing, openness, and collaboration.

Life

Favorite activity when you’re not working?

I play in several hockey leagues—roller hockey and ice hockey—and we have some truly fantastic team names, the NYC Puck Pigeons being my favorite. Additionally, I enjoy hiking, biking, traveling, and walking around NYC with absolutely no destination in mind.

Favorite place you’ve traveled?

Greece—incredible food, beautiful Islands, and overall a great experience. Domestically, I’ve really enjoyed visiting Colorado, in both the summer and winter. And one bonus mention: Quebec City is awesome—feels like Europe, but only a short flight from New York.

Interesting fact about yourself… Go!

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my wife and I ended up having FOUR different wedding dates. In the end, we got married in Sept. 2021, about 16 months after our original date.

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

Benelinx’s Story: Using Ideon to seamlessly provide brokers with data from multiple carriers

Posted on by Ideon

“Ideon cleans up the big mess the industry has built”

With the agency management software Benelinx, employee benefits brokers access health insurance quotes from multiple carriers in a flash. The company was started by Rachel Zeman, who formerly ran a brokerage and was frustrated with the redundancies and errors that were par for the course in the space.

In contrast to the traditional, broken model, brokers using Benelinx’s quoting engine have to enter a client’s parameters just once to quote and compare medical plans from numerous carriers.

Backstage, Ideon’s APIs quietly power Benelinx’s quoting tool through seamless data exchange. (We’re the strong, silent type.)

Benelinx

Helping agencies compete nationwide.

  • The Benelinx system, with data from Ideon, allows brokers to get accurate health insurance quotes from multiple carriers, saving hours on every proposal.
  • Ideon makes it easy for Benelinx to expand into new states and offer additional products without the need to negotiate with and connect to additional carriers.

Background

Rachel Zeman built RiteHealth Solutions into a thriving benefits brokerage based in Boulder, Colorado In 2019, she sold that company and started Benelinx to offer other brokers access to the customized software platform she had built for her own firm. Benelinx relies on Ideon to make it easier for brokers to provide quotes that compare rates from multiple carriers.

Q&A

Tell us more about why you started Benelinx
When I ran a brokerage we had become increasingly frustrated with the industry’s archaic systems, which are littered with redundancies and errors that don’t make sense in the modern world. We’d ask, “Why do we have to enter the same client information five times into five different systems?” And there was never a good answer. So we decided to streamline the process and built applications on the Salesforce platform. I knew this was something the market needed and it wasn’t available.

What problems do brokers face getting quotes for health insurance?
Most agencies are still running their entire business on Excel spreadsheets. If they want to make a proposal for clients, they have to go to the websites of four, five, six carriers, and upload the employee census to each, then download a quote. Then they have to compare them because every carrier’s rates and requirements are different. The only practical alternative they had was to work with a general agent that had relationships with multiple carriers, but as brokers get larger they often want to bring more in-house.

How does Benelinx make that easier?
The broker just enters the parameters for a particular client and uploads the census one time. Then all we have to do is ping Ideon, and we get back everything that is available to the client based on each carrier’s underwriting requirements. Every time we demo the quote function to a broker they are blown away.

Why did you decide to use Ideon to power your quoting engine?
The only other option would be to go to all of the carriers directly. It would have been very painful. When we started, we tried to get carriers to give us their rates electronically, and most wouldn’t give us the time of day. If they did agree, the data they sent would have to be cleaned, verified, and put into a standard format. Every carrier uses its own system and way of transferring data. Ideon cleans up the big mess the industry has built.

Can you describe the experience of integrating Ideon into your system?
My developers would say they have had nothing but amazing support, starting when we were integrating Ideon into our system. The customer service was great, and all their technology was up-to-date.

What’s the biggest advantage of working with Ideon?
Ideon has made it easy for us to grow. They are adding new products, like level funded plans. That’s something our clients have been asking for so now we can plug it into our system. It’s so simple. We’ve also been able to expand nationally. If we didn’t have Ideon we would have to go state by state and convince every carrier to give us rates. I can’t fathom what that would look like.

How does your story fit into the broader industry picture?
Our industry is in the middle of a huge consolidation, and that makes it difficult for many brokers. There is nothing more important than maintaining boutique brokers that can help smaller-size businesses make complicated and expensive decisions about healthcare. Ideon is helping us offer a very affordable solution that lets brokers of all sizes compete.

 

PerfectQuote’s Story: How Ideon’s data powers the company’s small-group quoting tool for brokers

Posted on by Ideon

“Ideon does all the heavy lifting—cleansing, filtering, refining all that data from carriers—and then they output a single, consistent data format that’s really easy for us to consume”

PerfectQuote is a SaaS solution for employee benefits brokers and agents, founded in 2017 on the hypothesis that there had to be an alternative to the manual spreadsheeting of benefits and rates. And indeed there was. With PerfectQuote’s software, benefits brokers in the large group space can now quote, analyze, compare, and present plans from carriers in all 50 states.

But what of the small-group space, you ask?

Powered by Ideon, PerfectQuote now offers one of the industry’s leading small group quoting experiences. Want an inside look at how PerfectQuote expanded its platform? See below.

Perfect Quote

Helping Employee Benefits brokers and their teams sell more, faster and better

  • Ideon’s data powers the small-group side of PerfectQuote’s Group Insurance CPQ software.
  • Ideon’s data helps PerfectQuote eliminate thousands of hours of labor that would otherwise be devoted to sourcing, normalizing and presenting plan and rate data.

Background

Since 2017, PerfectQuote has provided quoting, analysis and presentation software to group brokers and general agents, with the goal of supporting plans for small (ACA) and large-group medical in all 50 states, alternative-funded and ancillary lines of coverage.

To understand how the company works with Ideon, we spoke with Aaron Snyder, president and co-founder, and Curtis Kadohama, head of product. Their answers have been consolidated and edited for clarity.

Q&A

What’s the cocktail party version of PerfectQuote?
Aaron Snyder: PerfectQuote’s CEO and co-founder, Justin Sylvester, was an employee benefits consultant. Around 2013 he started thinking that there had to be a better way to support brokers and their teams in the manually intensive process of spreadsheeting benefits for clients. He developed the initial push of the idea and in 2017, we started to collaborate. The next year we came out with our first product, called PerfectQuote, with the proposition that we could eliminate the laborious data entry that had been required to sell and renew insurance for brokers in the large group space. While brokers had some options for small group, PerfectQuote was designed to allow brokers to upload any quote file, from any carrier, for any size group. From this point, they would have the ability to analyze and present employee benefits options quickly and easily and without error.

How does Ideon enter into this?
Aaron Snyder: As I mentioned, one of our main differentiators is that we support the large-group portion of a broker’s book of business, with plan and rate data that we get directly from carriers. But on the small-group side, which involves many more carriers, we didn’t have a solution that could support a broker’s entire book of business. So, like any nimble start-up, we developed our small group module and quickly figured out that Ideon could be a single source of truth for small group data,and eliminate some of the friction we experience within the other side of the platform. Ideon provides a very essential function for us.

Why is it such an essential function?
Curtis Kadohama: The easiest way to understand the value of Ideon is to compare our small group and large group data workflows. In the large group market, every carrier has its own format for quote files, each of which may also vary by state. So we’re constantly having to adapt to new file formats, new layouts, new ways of carriers interpreting and illustrating benefit values. It’s highly manual and time intensive. Compare that to our small-group workflow. Ideon does all the heavy lifting—cleansing, filtering, refining all that data from carriers—before they output a single, consistent data format that’s easy for us to consume.

Can you quantify the savings in time or effort from using Ideon as your small-group data source?
Curtis Kadohama: We’ve done some rough analysis. Let’s say there’s a new PDF quote file we receive from one carrier for one state covering one plan. We estimate it would take us 15 hours in terms of scraping, mapping, analyzing, developing, QAing, and refining before we can say, “Okay, it’s ready to use by our brokers.” Now compare that to what happens with Ideon. We’ve already done our integration with them, which took some development time—and each year we’ll spend a little dev time on updates—but for a given employer group, depending on the state, our application could give a broker 700 or 800 plans to present to his or her client, in a matter of seconds. In contrast, a broker’s offering to a client is typically limited to how many spreadsheets of plans can be manually created using carrier documents and PDFs. It’s a pretty drastic difference.

Are there benefits to partnering with Ideon beyond time savings?
Curtis Kadohama: Having a dependable source of data helps on the inbound side, in terms of knowing that we’re receiving reliable information. It allows us to consistently and confidently display information in our application and in our Excel exports to customers. Compare that, again, to our large-group side, where the data we receive is both inconsistent in terms of categorization of information and challenging in terms of quality, with missing decimal places, dollar signs, percentage signs. It’s a difficult experience for everyone, from the people on our team processing that data to the end brokers who have to interpret it. Ideon basically removes those challenges from the small-group side of our business—and to the extent that there are questions or complexity to clarify, which is inevitable, the Ideon team is highly responsive.