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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.

Gravie’s Story: How Ideon eliminated heaps of manual work and allowed for market expansion

Posted on by Ideon

“Partnering with Ideon makes us a scalable solution”

For nearly a decade, Gravie has been disrupting the health insurance space through its innovative health benefits solutions, from pre-tax individual market options to its own flagship health plan, Comfort.

Since 2018, Ideon has played an important role in streamlining Gravie’s processes. Nicole Lovaas, a vice president at Gravie, shared how things looked before Ideon came on the scene:

We used data we found on healthcare.gov or from the Department of Commerce or other sources—for every state. It was very labor-intensive. We had to enter all the information we collected into Excel spreadsheets, which we then loaded into our system to display plan and rate data.

The folks at Gravie also knew that ICHRAs were going to be a big deal in 2020, and were eager to present themselves as a national solution. However, they were unenthusiastic about the multiplicity of sources that would need to be involved.

Want to learn how Gravie said sayonara to manual processes—and expanded their national reach? Get the case study here.

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APIs, decision support, and more: An employee benefits trend report in six quotes

Posted on by Ideon

Ideon’s place at the center of the health insurance and employee benefits industry means we have a clear view of the technology trends shaping the entire ecosystem. But we’re hardly the only ones talking about the growing importance of APIs, digital connectivity, and other transformative innovations.

Here are six trends ushering in the digital age of employee benefits, plus what industry leaders are saying about them.

The healthcare industry embraced interoperability. Employee benefits isn’t far behind.

“Interoperability has been a huge buzzword in the healthcare industry in the last few years, and we’re now seeing it in the employee benefits space for the first time. Data is siloed between various systems and the next wave of technological innovation will be focused on connecting these systems. Not only does it eliminate manual tasks and reduce errors, but it can unlock the ability to make better decisions and drive better outcomes for all.” — Ryan Sachtjen, ThreeFlow

 

Employees expect health insurance and benefits experiences to be as easy as online shopping.

“The goal is to make benefits-enrollment and selection changes take place in real time, replacing a traditionally manual, error-prone process with long wait times before coverage takes effect. Smart technology allows real-time data exchange with benefit carrier partners to simplify processes and improve the benefits experience.” — Amanda Pope, ADP

 

Decision support—which is growing in utilization—requires data connectivity and transparency. 

“The reality of decision support today is that the extent to which such tools can help users is greatly dependent on the quality and breadth of information they have to work with.” — Michael Levin, Ideon

 

Voluntary benefits—crucial in the fight for talent—depend on accurate, smooth-flowing data.

“Tailoring and recommending the benefit packages that best meet employee lifestyle needs eliminates the tedious employee task of sifting through voluntary benefit options. A data-driven approach to benefits can yield higher employee participation in benefits programs as well as improved employee tenure and retention.” — Neil Vaswani, Corestream

 

Efficient, API-powered connectivity is a game-changer for carriers.

“Overall, APIs are helping to provide a personalized experience, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. Looking ahead, carriers can expose APIs to broker partners and insurtech companies, to transact uniquely, improve operating efficiencies, and enhance experiences. The carriers that are able to easily interact with these partners and play within this ecosystem will have an advantage.” — James Ocampo, Wellfleet Workplace

 

API middleware is enabling carriers and BenAdmin platforms to exchange data with remarkable speed, flexibility, accuracy, and scalability.

“Having a middleware partner allows our engineers to work on our product. I don’t have to build out a gigantic team to focus on each of the carriers. Middleware keeps our operating costs low, and brokers can trust our platform to enroll groups with a multitude of different carriers without our having to build out connections to each of them.” — Cory Nicks, Rippling

 

Interested in more Ideon content and the latest benefits technology trends and analysis? Subscribe to our newsletter below!

 

Vericred Releases Annual Map of ICHRA-friendly States

Posted on by Ideon

**NOTE: Ideon is the company formerly known as Vericred. Vericred began operating as Ideon on May 18, 2022.**

2022 ACA health plan data shows that in nearly half of U.S. states, an ICHRA could be a cost effective solution for small employers seeking to give employees more plan options

December 16, 2021 – Vericred, the API platform powering digital quote-to-card experiences in health insurance and benefits, today announced it has released its annual map of states where insurance premiums are most friendly to Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs). Employers who choose to offer an ICHRA provide a monthly, tax-free stipend that employees put toward the premium of a plan they choose from the individual market. 

The Vericred 2022 ICHRA Map shows the counties and states where an employee using an ICHRA would likely find Affordable Care Act (ACA) individual premiums equal to, or less expensive than, ACA small group plan premiums, i.e., “ICHRA-friendly.” For each state, Vericred calculated the difference between the average (across all counties) lowest-cost Bronze plan in the ACA small group and individual markets. 

Key findings from the Vericred 2022 ICHRA Map include:

  • Nearly half of the U.S. is ICHRA-friendly — in 24 states, 2022 individual Bronze plan premiums are equal to or less expensive than small group plan premiums
  • The number of ICHRA-friendly states grew by 26% since 2021, when 19 states were considered ICHRA-friendly. In 2020, only 16 states were ICHRA-friendly 
  • The top five ICHRA-friendly states, are, in order, Ohio, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Mississippi
  • The five least ICHRA-friendly states, which have a market where premiums in the ACA individual market are most expensive compared with the ACA small group market, are, in order, Alabama, Oklahoma, Illinois, Tennessee and West Virginia
  • Some states have flipped – Maryland was ICHRA-friendly last year, and is now not ICHRA-friendly. In 2021, Kansas was among the least ICHRA-friendly states; now it is no longer 

“Historically, individual market premiums have been more expensive than small group premiums. Our data shows this is changing, and fast. ICHRA is now an attractive, cost-effective option for employers seeking to offer employees health insurance for the first time, or for those offering coverage, to control their benefit costs,” said Michael W. Levin, CEO and co-founder of Vericred. “We expect this trend to continue in the coming year, and as a result, we anticipate that more employers will offer ICHRAs.”

Resources

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. Visit www.vericred.com.

Vericred Powers One-Stop Shop for Employee Benefits Quoting with Expanded Group Rating API

Posted on by Ideon

**NOTE: Ideon is the company formerly known as Vericred. Vericred began operating as Ideon on May 18, 2022.**

Adding two new lines of coverage, Vericred offers the only API enabling group medical, vision, dental, life, and disability insurance quoting

November 9, 2021 – Vericred, the API platform powering digital quote-to-card experiences in health insurance and benefits, today announced it has added group life and disability insurance lines of coverage to its industry-leading, multi-carrier Group Rating API (application programming interface). Employee benefits quoting platforms now have one API from which to power a multi-line, data-driven quoting experience for brokers and employers. 

Guardian Life is among the first life and disability insurance carriers to partner with Vericred at launch of the expanded API. The Group Rating API enables carriers to augment the distribution of their products through more digital sales channels, including benefits-focused insurtechs.

Using the enhanced Group Rating API, Vericred’s quoting platform customers can now easily quote and compare all of the most commonly offered benefits without building and maintaining their own carrier connectivity and rating engines. More than 300 insurance carriers and 100 insurtech companies rely on Vericred for digital connectivity and seamless data exchange, including industry leaders Cigna, Guardian, Humana, Principal, Rippling, Gusto, and Ease.

“By adding the life and disability lines to our rating API, we are helping our quoting platform customers be more efficient, so they can spend more time serving their clients and less time on connectivity and data sourcing,” said Michael W. Levin, Vericred’s co-founder and CEO. “Vericred is a one-stop shop for employee benefits connectivity, from quote to card, supporting insurtechs, carriers, and brokers in meeting the needs of the group market today.”

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. Visit www.vericred.com.

How third-party quoting platforms can drive better analytics and more sales for health insurance carriers

Posted on by Ideon
By Matt Leonard, Ideon’s Vice President of Carrier Relations

In recent years, brokers have flocked to third-party services to quote health insurance plans from multiple carriers. As a result, most carriers wanted to immediately tap into this new, growing distribution channel. They were quick to share rates and product information with external partners, making the downstream quoting process easy and accurate for brokers assembling employer proposals.

But not all carriers bought in. Holdouts chose to keep rates in-house, forcing brokers to obtain quotes directly from them. Their chief concern: a perceived black hole of visibility and analytics. Specifically, carriers worried they’d lose access to valuable information typically gleaned when brokers quoted plans via carrier websites and portals—e.g., which brokers sold what products (and where), what employer groups were shopping for new policies, etc.

Today, with a majority of health insurance carriers having made their plans and rates available to third-party quoting platforms, we can now see whether those early fears were justified.

Short answer: Carriers that embraced the “platform revolution” are being rewarded with a stream of high-quality data that can drive advanced analytics and turbocharge sales operations. In fact, their visibility into quoting activity on platforms is not all that different compared to if quotes are prepared on carrier websites. It’s truly a win-win—i.e., modern distribution combined with valuable insights.

Meanwhile, carriers that are not distributing their rates continue to miss out in two ways: limited distribution to digital sales channels and zero visibility into how—and if—their products are being quoted externally.

To understand why, let’s examine two scenarios.

  1. Carrier relies entirely on in-house website or portal for quoting

    In the past, brokers logged on to each carrier’s website to get the quotes they needed to assemble a client proposal. That’s a lot of busy work for the broker, but it gave the carrier critical information. Location data, insights on which brokers are quoting which plans, and information about group sizes and quote-to-close ratios are all part of the typical carrier analytics package. And when they see quotes generated for potentially lucrative accounts, the carriers can assign sales representatives to help brokers to win the business.

    This may seem like an appealing option to carriers that want full control over where their products are quoted. And, understandably, they crave these in-depth analytics. But this mindset—control over distribution—is built upon a false premise. Third-party quoting platforms still add the plan and rate information of non-participating carriers, mainly by tracking down public filings and other sources.

    The difference? The data could well be incomplete or out-of-date, risking the possibility of inaccurate quotes appearing on client proposals. And carriers receive no information at all about how well their products are doing on downstream platforms and no leads on deals in progress.

  2. Carrier engages with today’s platform ecosystem

    Today, nearly all brokers use quoting platforms to save time compiling rates from multiple carriers and building proposals. Most carriers understand this reality and have reacted accordingly. These carriers distribute their product information to quoting platforms to ensure rates and plans are represented accurately.

    At the same time, the participating carriers have access to a precise record of every quote issued, often specifying the individual broker, the employer group, and more.

    Carriers can use this data to build sophisticated analytics that can help optimize the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and commission programs. For example, they can calculate the quote-to-close ratio across different brokers, client types, geographic areas, and commission rates. Carriers are also feeding the data they get from quoting platforms directly into their CRM systems. That way their sales team can monitor how well they are being represented by each broker in the market and react quickly to opportunities.

 

Today, most carriers clearly see the two main advantages in working with platforms: distribution and visibility. The good news for those only now seeing the light is that they can catch up quickly, i.e., they need not build relationships with platforms from scratch. Middleware vendors, like Ideon, act as one-to-many distribution partners for carriers, accepting their plan data in any format and sharing it throughout today’s modern quoting ecosystem. And because a middleware partner pulls in quote activity and analytics from many downstream platforms, carriers get all the visibility they need to make informed decisions.

What are the opportunities that non-participating carriers are missing? Consider the recent experience of one new Ideon customer, a major health plan in the South, that recently started using our solutions to publish their plan information to quoting platforms. Until then, this carrier had assumed that most brokers were looking up their rates on their website. They were shocked when they looked at the analytics we delivered to find that brokers, using third-party platforms, were quoting their plans 600+ times per month. Before Ideon, the carrier had zero insight into these potential new business opportunities.

Now that’s a black hole to be concerned about. Contact us to learn more!

Build vs. Buy: The Case for Enhancing Carrier Connectivity to Improve Enrollment Experiences

Posted on by Zach Wallens
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.

Opportunity Awaits BenAdmins that support ICHRAs

Posted on by Ideon

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:

  1. 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.  
  2. 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. 
  3. 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.