Author: Abby Grunewald
Build vs. Buy: The Case for Enhancing Carrier Connectivity to Improve Enrollment Experiences
By Zach Wallens, Communications Manager at Ideon
One-stop-shop HR and benefits administration (BenAdmin) platforms, which integrate all elements of the employee experience into a centralized system, are the future of the benefits industry. From health insurance and dental coverage to telehealth and gym memberships, those BenAdmins that offer the most-popular employee benefits on one platform will boast the best user experience and, as a result, a significant advantage over rivals. In fact, some forward-thinking BenAdmins are already preparing for this all-in-one future, laying a foundation to scale aggressively and add new benefits at a moment’s notice.
But this trend raises an important question: How, from a technical standpoint, will BenAdmins add all of these benefits products—from numerous insurance carriers and other providers—to their platforms?
The answer, as most BenAdmin executives know, is digital connectivity. BenAdmin platforms have long identified connectivity with carriers as a technological necessity—and competitive differentiator—for success in today’s digital-first age. Connectivity enables BenAdmins to present up-to-date product information, enroll employees in benefits digitally, and transfer group and employee-specific information to carriers and other providers. It is a pivotal component of any modern BenAdmin experience.
But while digital connectivity is universally accepted as integral to any tech-forward BenAdmin’s UX strategy, a consensus has yet to develop on the issue of building or buying a solution for developing and maintaining carrier connections. Many BenAdmins elected to utilize their existing technology team to build integrations to carrier systems because this was, until recently, their only option.
This go-it-alone “build” approach, however, has been technically and operationally challenging for BenAdmins. Establishing and sustaining relationships with hundreds of carriers and providers—each with unique systems and formats to which BenAdmins have had to conform—is a process that is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, integrating to each carrier’s core systems, one by one, involves tremendous development resources.
These drawbacks are prompting many BenAdmins to consider a new digital connectivity strategy: the “buy” approach. Indeed, a growing number have determined that buying connectivity on a mass scale, through a carrier connectivity partner such as Ideon, is a more effective use of resources than building those bridges themselves.
In this scenario, BenAdmins integrate with a single partner’s API, and it’s that partner’s responsibility to manage the connections and exchange of data—often in real time—with carriers and benefit providers.
These BenAdmins are outsourcing carrier connectivity to specialists in just that skill, resulting in massive efficiency gains, a quicker path to scalability, and better experiences for end users—employers, HR teams, and employees. Such forward-thinking benefits platforms have decided that it makes more business sense to invest in a turnkey solution that is built, managed and regularly improved by industry-specific digital connectivity experts than to devote time, money and labor to create multiple carrier integrations themselves.
Instead, these BenAdmins are taking the savings achieved from outsourcing connectivity and investing them in the development of improved experiences for their customers’ employees. Data-driven plan selection, personalized decision support, integrated telehealth services, and robust ancillary offerings are just a few of the tech-enabled experiences that employees expect from their BenAdmin. These are features that require ongoing iteration and improvement, and represent far better destinations for operational capital.
Buying is the new frontier of BenAdmin-to-Carrier connectivity, a forward-facing reallocation of resources that goes a long way towards enhancing their competitive advantage.
Silicon Prairie News: NYC insurtech startup Vericred expands to Omaha, expects to add 30 – 40 new high-skill jobs
Digital Distribution Glossary for Forward-Thinking Health Plan Executives
Omaha World-Herald: Vericred, an insurance tech company, will open Omaha office in Old Mill area
KETV OMAHA: New York-based insurance startup picks Omaha to double workforce
Vericred Announces Expanded Omaha Operations Following $23 Million Series B Funding
**NOTE: Ideon is the company formerly known as Vericred. Vericred began operating as Ideon on May 18, 2022.**
OMAHA, Neb., July 7, 2021 – New York City-based Vericred, a data platform powering digital experiences in health insurance and employee benefits, today announced plans to expand operations in Omaha.
The InsurTech platform, which recently completed $23 million in Series B funding, said the Omaha location will support the doubling of Vericred’s workforce, by adding an expected 30-40 highly skilled positions in the Metro. Vericred has hired a husband and wife—Matthew Leonard and Val Leonard, both formerly of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska—to lead its carrier and Omaha-based enrollment teams, respectively.
“As a technology, insurance and financial services hub, Omaha is a natural fit to support Vericred’s growth,” said Michael W. Levin, CEO and co-founder of Vericred. “We considered locations throughout the U.S. for our enrollments operations, and landed on Omaha, because of its insurance-industry talent, its emerging startup scene and its reputation as an incubator of innovation.”
Vericred’s entry into the Omaha market was facilitated by a public-private collaborative of stakeholders, including the Greater Omaha Chamber Economic Development Partnership, a seven-county collective representing 44 percent of Nebraska’s population, and more than 60 percent of the state’s GDP.
“We are pleased to welcome Vericred to Omaha and are roundly impressed with the remarkable progress they’ve made during a pandemic economy,” said David G. Brown, president and CEO, Greater Omaha Chamber. “Vericred scouted office locations, signed a lease and hired Omaha leadership, all remotely.”
Omaha, ranked the best city in Nebraska to get a job in 2021, according to Zippia, has outpaced the nation in finance-and-insurance-industry growth for the past six years, increasing at a rate of 26.2 percent compared to national average of 7.1 percent.
“We’re happy to be in Omaha, and ready to hire across our enrollment operations, engineering, sales, and carrier relations teams,” Levin said.
About Vericred
Vericred is the way health insurance carriers and employee benefits providers connect with new technology partners to deliver seamless quote-to-card consumer experiences. We are not the websites or apps you use to choose a plan or find a doctor. We are the infrastructure. We are the ‘pipes’ that simplify the complex exchange of quoting, enrollment and eligibility data between carriers and the technology partners responsible for delivering health and employee benefits to hundreds of millions of Americans everyday. Our APIs transmit billions of data points between InsurTech and insurance carriers, powering digital distribution across the insurance industry. Come join the community of insurance geeks creating a seamless digital quote-to-card experience.
About the Greater Omaha Chamber Economic Development Partnership
The Greater Omaha Chamber Economic Development Partnership (https://www.omahachamber.org/economic-development/) represents a seven-county area from two states (Nebraska and Iowa) that includes Cass, Dodge, Douglas, Otoe, Pottawattamie, Sarpy and Washington Counties.
About Greater Omaha
Greater Omaha is a No. 1 ranked up-and-coming-tech hotspot, a “top 10 best place to live on a $60,000 salary” and was named America’s No. 2 Best Small City by Resonance Consultancy. The region is a top-five “most remarkable waterfronts in the U.S.” and is home to more than 30 communities and nearly 1 million people.
About the Greater Omaha Chamber
The mission of the Greater Omaha Chamber is to champion a thriving business community and a prosperous region through visionary leadership and collaboration.
Opportunity Awaits BenAdmins that support ICHRAs
By now, Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs) are no secret. Emerging only two years ago as an obscure addition to federal health insurance regulation, ICHRAs are now among the hottest topics in employer-sponsored benefits. But any significant employer shift to ICHRAs will require answer to a pair of important questions:
- Is there an ICHRA role for benefits administration (BenAdmin) platforms?
- If so, what exactly is it?
We can begin to answer both by examining the motivation for companies large and small to migrate to ICHRAs. For small companies, ICHRAs are often a way to do something as an alternative to not offering employer sponsored health insurance. In fact, 70% of the small employers (<50 employees) offering an ICHRA today are contributing to their employees’ health insurance for the first time, according to Take Command Health. ICHRAs also allow small employers to get out of the often-burdensome benefits administration business. So, at the end of the day, there may be very little opportunity for BenAdmins in ICHRA-based small employers.
Large employers, however, are another thing.
There are several reasons why large employers might adopt ICHRAs—but getting out of the benefits administration business is not one of them. First, a feature of ICHRAs is that they allow employers to move classes of employees to ICHRAs while keeping others on their existing group health plans. This provides more choice—and therefore a better benefit experience—to certain classes of employees. The last thing such employers want is to undermine a better insurance experience with a lesser benefits administration experience. These employers will very much want their BenAdmins to support individual and group products.
A second reason large employers that adopt ICHRAs will not move away from BenAdmins is that they want to keep certain products (e.g., group life and disability) on the group “chassis.” This, too, requires BenAdmins to support both individual and group products.
All of which suggests a three-point game plan for BenAdmins to remain competitive in an ICHRA world:
- Support both individual- and group-plan comparison. BenAdmins must be able to support a hybrid individual and group plan comparison experience. For instance: group health and ancillary for some employees but individual health and group ancillary for other employees. And unlike the group market, where a typical employee may choose from a handful of medical plans that are fairly easily configurable, tens (if not hundreds) of plans may be available and will therefore need to be configured.
- Support both individual- and group-plan decision support. Accounting for tens (or hundreds) of medical plans exacerbates the complexity of plan choice by each employee. So BenAdmins must shepherd employees through the decision process with the appropriate tools and features. What was once optional (shop-by-doc, shop-by-drug) is now table stakes.
- Support both individual- and group-enrollment and eligibility changes. Only offering plan selection during open-enrollment period (OEP) is not enough. BenAdmins will need to support individual enrollment, demographic changes, QLEs, etc. for individual products. This represents a whole new integration challenge for BenAdmins.
Bottom line: ICHRAs are an opportunity
ICHRAs do not spell the end of benefit administration— at least not with larger employers. But BenAdmins will need to enhance their platforms to support this new and important coverage option. And in doing so, they will set themselves apart from competitors who disregard a coverage option that could become as ubiquitous as 401(k)s.
If you’re interested in reading more of Ideon’s 2021 ICHRA research and learning how APIs can streamline the development of ICHRA solutions, download our full-length ICHRA toolkit.
What makes a health insurance carrier broker friendly?
Brokers and agents want to generate quotes and service customers within software they already use—and with the least amount of manual data entry
For health-insurance carriers, it is the moment of truth: A broker, having learned a client’s needs and researched available options, now must recommend a plan. To get the business, it’s not enough for a carrier to offer a competitive price, an optimized network, and desired plan features; several carriers will likely meet that hurdle. It’s also not simply a matter of brand strength, personal relationships, or commission structure either. Increasingly, the moment-of-truth differentiators for brokers is which carrier a) most successfully reduces their administrative burden, and b) uses automation that simplifies the experience of brokers, members, and—for business plans—employers.
For carriers, meeting brokers’ changing expectations requires a significant shift in mindset and a handful of inexpensive, simple strategic moves. The reality of today’s marketplace is that carriers that share data and technology with brokers win more business than those that maintain barriers—deliberate or inadvertent—that keep agents from the information they need to close sales. When all things are equal, a broker will choose the carrier that enables the tools brokers are already using. But this reality is hardly a burden for carriers. Technology that makes things easier for brokers generally reduces administrative costs for carriers.
With this new reality in mind, here are four concrete steps carriers can take to become—and be seen as—true digital partners with their brokers:
- Connect with brokers where they work. Carriers work hard to differentiate themselves from competitors, and many ask brokers to use their broker portals to quote so they can highlight their unique benefits. This go-it-alone approach does create a distinct impression. More often than not, though, it drives business away. Here’s why: Most agencies have automated the process of gathering rate and plan information, comparing options and generating proposals. Carriers that only share plan data on their website throw a wrench into brokers’ machines, forcing them to copy information, reformat it and enter it into their quoting system (effectively doing the very thing carriers try to avoid, i.e., being “spreadsheeted”). Broker-friendly carriers, by contrast, distribute their data to the brokers’ quoting tools and agency management systems, empowering an agent to do all the work of creating a quote for customers in a single environment.
- Give brokers all the network information they need to help clients make smart decisions. Easy access to information about which providers participate in a carrier’s network is as important—when it comes to decision support—as rate data. Clients want insurance with a network that includes the doctors they use, and employers want to choose plans that meet the needs of most of their employees. Some carriers are burdened with legacy technology that can put technological roadblocks in front of brokers who are doing the time-consuming work of creating a disruption analysis for a business client that shows how many of their employees would need to switch providers under each plan. They require the broker to log into a proprietary website to check each provider manually. Carriers that publish detailed and up-to-date network information in standard electronic formats can save brokers hours of work on every proposal.
- Remove the excess manual work from enrollment and member management. If data is already in electronic form, brokers shouldn’t have to enter it again. This is especially exasperating for brokers when they upload a complex census of member information to underwrite a group plan, then have to re-enter all the same data when it’s time to enroll new members. Carriers that integrate with the systems the brokers are already using can create a seamless path from quote-to-card with no duplicate entry. This automation also makes the process faster and less error-prone, to the benefit of all.
- Support brokers’ digital distribution channels. Brokers themselves are rapidly changing how they service their individual and business clients, all of whom expect to have access to self-service tools for information and transactions. Some brokers go to market primarily through online experiences, allowing customers to shop, buy and service plans through websites and apps. Others offer digital channels that complement traditional face-to-face service. In the group market, brokers also want to leverage benefit administration systems that are increasingly used by businesses. But, too often, broker websites and apps are digital front end to an otherwise manual process. A plan participant might add a new baby to their broker’s app on Monday only to discover at the pediatrician’s office on Friday that the coverage has yet to be updated. Behind the app’s sleek façade is the broker’s back office that has to retype the information about the new dependent into a form that the carrier takes days to process. Carriers that can handle transactions electronically (and provide rapid confirmation) not only save money on back-office staff, they also improve member satisfaction overall, increasing the probability of group renewal.
Of course, the majority of insurance companies aren’t oblivious to the pressures that brokers face. Most are working on their own digital transformations, but these take time. In addition, many carriers have prioritized other projects ahead of building more robust digital connections to brokers. That’s a risky strategy in a market in which brokers can easily shift business to carriers that support their automation and minimize the back office work that keeps them from serving clients.
Smart carriers aren’t waiting until they’ve completely rebuilt their systems to support their brokers. They are finding ways to connect systems they already have to the software used by brokers and employers. Even if they don’t have the complete real-time functionality they may eventually want, such “hacks” can do a lot to reduce the burden on brokers, drive cleaner data to the carrier and to deliver better experiences to the member. Such efforts may be all that is needed in the short term to ensure that a carrier is top of mind the moment a broker recommends the best plan for a client.
Ideon enables the modern, efficient—even delightful—experiences that brokers, employers and members have come to expect. We connect carriers to broker and employer automation systems, without carriers having to build new technology or otherwise incurring capital expenses.
Contact us and we will gladly explore the state of your systems and distribution network to help find ways to delight your brokers without upending your technology roadmap.
The Future of Benefits Administration Platforms: Centralizing the Employee Experience
Basic health insurance ✅
401(k) ✅
Paid time off ✅
Employee benefits, once mostly a collection of must-check boxes, have transformed into multifaceted rewards programs, customizable to meet the needs of each employee and a key differentiator in recruitment and retention. Ancillary benefits such as pet insurance, gym memberships, and financial assistance programs are becoming the norm, fueling higher expectations for what employees receive, beyond compensation, from their employers. The enhancement and personalization of employee benefits, however, has caused a ripple effect throughout the world of benefits administration (BenAdmin) platforms.
The ways in which BenAdmins have adapted to this new dynamic offer a predictive glimpse into the future of this crucial sector. Just the basics—health insurance enrollment, management of paid time off (PTO), etc.—will no longer cut it. Instead, forward-thinking BenAdmins are preparing for the future: all-in-one platforms that integrate all elements of the employee experience into a centralized system.
From payroll, dental insurance and 401(k)s to FSAs, wellness programs, retirement plans, stock options and student loan repayment, BenAdmins of the future will consolidate all relevant information within one central platform. Those who succeed will not only be incredibly agile—easily adding the hottest non-core benefits of the day—they will be perceived as incredibly agile, representing a major differentiator. They will possess personalized data and insights to share with employees so they can make more-informed decisions about health and benefits products.
So what is the future of benefits administration? In a word, unified. A single system to rule them all. No employee—and, for that matter, no broker or employer—wants one system of record for health insurance, another to manage stock options, and still another to review HSA balances and employee assistance programs (EAP).
Although tying all of these components together into a single platform will become an essential differentiator between BenAdmins, certain features are gaining in popularity and will ultimately be expected by employees. Here are three trending features that will be an important part of all future BenAdmin platforms:
- Healthcare concierge services help employees navigate the complexities of our healthcare system, from recommending providers and facilities based on quality and cost, to minimizing healthcare spend by redirecting employees to, for example, an in-network urgent care facility.
- BenAdmins of the future must consider employee wellness a vital piece of the benefits package. Mental health assistance, financial wellness programs, and telehealth services should be easily accessible and integrated into the centralized employee experience.
- Personalized ancillary benefits provide employees with the opportunity to select the non-core benefits that best fit their needs and interests. Some might prefer a gym membership and pet insurance to an HSA, and others may deem student loan assistance a prerequisite for any job offer. More choices, more benefits, more customization—that’s a key pillar of the future of benefits administration.
The future of benefits administration is truly limitless, but it can only reach its unified, all-in-one potential if, on the back-end, BenAdmins have agility and connectivity. Agility because, inevitably, new benefits options—perhaps even entirely new benefits categories—will become popular as younger employees enter the workforce and expect benefits packages to align with their interests. To remain competitive, BenAdmins will need a scalable method to integrate these benefits quickly and efficiently.
Connectivity enables BenAdmins to exchange group and employee-level data with carriers and other benefits providers, such as telehealth, gyms and wellness companies. BenAdmin connectivity is the first step in bringing the full employee benefits experience onto one platform, allowing employees to enroll in and manage benefits across a variety of carriers, lines of coverage, and products. Historically, carrier and benefit provider connectivity has been technically and operationally challenging for BenAdmins. But today, APIs offer BenAdmins a lifeline to simplified, flexible and scalable connectivity with multiple parties.
To learn more about how APIs can streamline connectivity in the benefits ecosystem and prepare BenAdmin platforms for the future, contact Ideon for a consultation.