Topic: Carriers

At Ideon, we’re dedicated to facilitating seamless enrollments and data exchange for our carrier and benefits platform customers. That means not only maintaining the fast, accurate, and scalable connections they expect, but also providing greater transparency and visibility—qualities that have been lacking in our industry.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce a major enhancement to our product suite: the Ideon Dashboard, a powerful new interface that compliments our existing API endpoints. With enhanced monitoring of group implementation statuses and the ability to submit, track, and resolve issues, this dashboard brings unparalleled visibility, efficiency, and collaboration to Ideon’s enrollment customers.

The dashboard enables effective three-way collaboration between carriers, benefits platforms, and Ideon, allowing for the swift resolution of issues when they arise. It eliminates the clutter of email threads and ensures no issues are overlooked, all in a centralized, user-friendly tool that keeps all parties in the loop.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key features.

Improved Visibility with the Enrollment Tasks Manager

Historically, setting up and managing group enrollments required numerous steps and lots of back-and-forth communication between carriers and benefits platforms. Ideon’s dashboard changes this equation. Carriers and platforms can now access real-time updates on the status of enrollment data that’s been loaded into Ideon’s system. This added visibility minimizes confusion and prevents potential delays in member enrollment.

At a glance, customers can get an immediate overview of their data across all groups, including details such as carrier-specific identifiers and coverage start and end dates. For each coverage period, they can monitor the status and owner of all completed and upcoming setup tasks. 

Tasks can be assigned to specific users from the platform, Ideon, or the carrier, ensuring there’s alignment on next steps and responsibilities. Additionally, comments and attachments can be added to each task, providing necessary context and encouraging collaboration. This not only eliminates lengthy email exchanges but expedites the process of getting groups live.

Through the transparency and visibility provided by the Enrollment Tasks Manager, Ideon customers will always be informed about the status of their groups. They’ll have accurate and up-to-date information to share with members, brokers, and HR teams, ensuring a better enrollment experience with clear timelines and expectations.

Efficient Issue Resolution with the Customer Ticketing System

As carriers and benefits platforms’ operational teams know all too well, issues are bound to happen in our industry, whether it’s discrepant group information, a member inquiry, or another pressing matter.

The Ideon Dashboard offers streamlined issue resolution with its intuitive Customer Ticketing System. It centralizes communication and collaboration, allowing customers to easily submit, track, and resolve their questions, concerns, and escalations. With everything in one place, scattered communication channels like Slack and email are eliminated, and tickets are monitored right alongside the groups they belong to.

For each ticket, customers can provide notes, severity info, and useful attachments or documentation. Comment threads help maintain individualized communication with Ideon, and watcher functionality and email notifications keep customers in-the-know at all times.

Conclusion

The Ideon Dashboard is a powerful addition to Ideon’s enrollment solution, providing greater levels of visibility, efficiency, and collaboration to carriers and platforms—both during group setup and in production.

The new interface is designed to enhance the overall transparency and effectiveness of working with Ideon in a secure, centralized way. But it’s meant to complement, not replace Ideon’s suite of APIs.

All data and functionality offered by the dashboard are also available via Ideon’s existing API endpoints and webhooks. Using these features, our customers can seamlessly integrate status updates and other information into their own tooling and user experience. It’s all part of the unrivaled enrollment experience that Ideon delivers to our customers, their operations teams, and, ultimately, members, employers, and brokers.

Schedule a demo

The Ideon Dashboard has already seen great success among several of our carrier and benefits platform customers, and we can’t wait to show you all of its features. You can watch a short demo above, or reach out to schedule a personalized walkthrough.

By Jashan Ahuja
Group Product Manager – Enrollment

In Part 1 of a series detailing our enrollment API’s features and capabilities, Ideon’s product team examines error reporting and management — how it works, what benefits platforms can expect, and the advantages of a centralized workflow.

Historically, it’s been an operational and technical nightmare for benefits platforms to exchange group and employee enrollment information with medical and voluntary carriers. No matter the carrier’s method of data exchange — EDI, API, portals, etc. — getting data from platform to carrier was rarely a simple task.

But once connected, it’s smooth sailing, right? Not quite. As benefits platforms’ operational teams know all too well, sending data is only part of the equation. The carrier must accept and confirm the change, and that’s where things start to get really complicated. Usually, the biggest challenge is handling and rectifying enrollment data errors—every carrier sends discrepancies in a different format, and their error reports are rarely human-readable.

At Ideon, we’re powering a new era of connection between carriers and tech platforms. One that’s better, faster, and more secure than the industry status quo. In this blog, we explain Ideon’s error-handling features, from standardizing carrier error messages to resolving errors via API, and how they create a far more efficient and accurate enrollment experience.

What are enrollment discrepancies?

It’s hard to find someone with experience in benefits who doesn’t think that data errors and discrepancies are a problem. Some examples include account set up issues, incorrect employee demographic information (social security number, birth date, etc.), coverage date errors, and more.

Today, most carriers report errors in non-standard formats, often via email and spreadsheets. These reports are usually delivered on a weekly basis, and the information they contain is rarely easy to understand. The result is a slow, manual, and resource-intensive error-handling process that poses a challenge to benefits platforms and their operations teams.

What’s the impact?

We analyzed the data from hundreds of groups and thousands of members and found that about 8% of employee enrollments have a critical coverage issue, i.e. incorrect coverage dates, plan information, or birth date, or they’re missing entirely from either the carrier or platform system. Importantly, more than 80% of groups with 20+ members have critical errors.

And these errors have significant ramifications for the entire benefits ecosystem – from carriers and benefits platforms, to brokers, employers, and employees. The downstream impact ranges from lost revenue and broker commissions, to operational inefficiencies and employee experience issues.

Carriers are missing out on millions in potential premium. In one recent migration of about 200,000 employees onto the Ideon platform, our technology identified errors resulting in nearly $1 million in lost premium for the carrier.

For the employers in that migration, we saved more than 30K employees from potential coverage issues — all from one migration of approximately 200K lives. Ultimately, inaccurate data can cause serious problems for employees. Everyone in our industry can relate to the countless access-to-care issues that occur during open enrollment because of erroneous data. Or, imagine a life insurance claim for an employee who wasn’t enrolled accurately — there would be an emotional and financial impact on a grieving family, while the employer and platform would likely suffer reputational harm.

For a detailed look at how inaccurate data impacts every benefits industry stakeholder, read this recent blog by Ideon CEO Michael Levin.

Enrollment discrepancies via Ideon

The processes outlined above remain the industry status quo: manual error handling through spreadsheets and emails, inconsistent carrier formats, and a barrage of harmful errors that affect all stakeholders.

At Ideon, we’ve developed a revolutionary alternative for benefits platforms where enrollment discrepancies are centralized, standardized, and actionable. Here are three ways our solution differs from the typical process:

• Many-to-one – Ideon translates all of the enrollment “errors” generated by carriers into a uniform and ingestible format.
• Standardized messaging – Each enrollment discrepancy has a “message,” which is a standardized version of the carrier error translated into a human-readable format.
• Centralized communication – Benefits platforms view and resolve all enrollment discrepancies, from multiple carriers, directly through Ideon’s API endpoint, allowing for a streamlined and centralized user experience and eliminating the need for other communication (e.g. e-mails and slack messages).

Centralized error management via Ideon’s API

Ideon’s error reporting solution helps platforms prioritize and rectify discrepancies by providing insight into the severity of each discrepancy and who’s responsible for fixing it. Regardless of the carrier or the original data source, platforms get a consistent, simple API experience.

In this section, we examine Ideon’s key error management features and highlight how platforms interact with our API.

(Image: Example of an API response sent from Ideon to a benefits platform. The response details an unresolved enrollment discrepancy, the party responsible for rectifying the issue, and other pertinent information.)

Severity – For each enrollment discrepancy we expose a Severity (“Info”, “Warning”, or “Failure”) that highlights the impact of the issue. A “Failure” enrollment discrepancy indicates a blocker to a member’s enrollment, whereas “Info” and “Warning” enrollment discrepancies provide visibility into informational updates or future changes required, for example when a dependent is due to age out in a couple of months.

Assignment – Each enrollment discrepancy has a Responsible Party and can be assigned to “Ideon” or “Partner”. This provides visibility into enrollment discrepancies that are currently being managed by our Enrollment Operations team and allows users to easily identify enrollment discrepancies that they need to address.

Status – Enrollment discrepancies have a status of “Unresolved”, “Resolved”, or “Returned”. This allows our teams to stay in-sync on each individual enrollment discrepancy. When we initially surface an enrollment discrepancy, it is in an “Unresolved” status. The status is updated to “Returned” when any comments are added and “Resolved” when a resolution message is provided.

Resolution – Partners are able to add a resolution message to an enrollment discrepancy via a simple API endpoint. This updates the status of the enrollment discrepancy to “Resolved”. If the issue still remains when the carrier re-attempts to process the data then the enrollment discrepancy can be reverted back to an “Unresolved” status so the history is retained.

Comments – Partners are able to interact with our operations team entirely via the enrollment discrepancies API endpoint by threading comments directly on the original enrollment discrepancy. This allows for efficient interaction between our respective Operational teams without needing additional tools or e-mails.

API and webhook transmission – Partners can pull down enrollment discrepancies directly from our API via a GET endpoint. We also provide enrollment discrepancies via Webhooks or a standard periodic CSV report.

(Image: Example of an API response sent from Ideon to a benefits platform. The response details a RESOLVED enrollment discrepancy.)

In summary, managing and rectifying enrollment data errors and discrepancies is a critical aspect of the benefits workflow. At Ideon, we understand the pain points of the industry and have developed a solution that streamlines the process by: standardizing error messaging; delivering a centralized resolution experience for benefits platforms; and helping them prioritize and, ultimately, resolve each discrepancy. Platforms can easily manage enrollment discrepancies, from multiple carriers, directly through our API endpoint, allowing for a streamlined experience without back-and-forth email communication.

Coming soon — Part 2: Auto reconciliation overview

Standardizing errors is a big step forward, but did you know Ideon can proactively identify them whether or not the carrier actually reports them? In the next blog in this series, we’ll dive into Ideon’s auto reconciliation feature, an industry-first capability that automatically compares data in the carrier and platform systems, surfacing discrepancies in near real-time.