IMPLEMENTING AND ADMINISTERING HEALTH BENEFITS THE EASY WAY

Sponsoring an employee health benefits plan is an invaluable way to support your employees, but it isn’t always easy. It can be a lot of work for you and your administration team, and employees may also have challenges interacting with the benefits plan. Luckily, when you partner with the right employee benefits provider it can be easy to implement and administer an employee health benefits plan.

Overcome Anxiety About Making a Change

Implementing a new employee health benefits plan sounds like a lot of work. If you already have an employee health benefits plan, then changing providers can also sound like a lot of work. The first hurdle to implementing and administering employee health benefits the easy way is to get past this misconception.

The simple truth is: with the right provider, implementing and administering your plan can be easy. Don’t get trapped into maintaining the status quo because you’re scared that making a change will be a lot of work.

Choose the Right Provider

If you are considering sponsoring a new employee health benefits plan, or if you are thinking about switching providers, you need to choose the right provider for you. The provider you choose is the key to whether or not implementing and administering the new plan is easy.

Choose a provider who shares your philosophy about employee group benefits. Ensure they have a proven track record and lots of experience in the industry. You’ll also want to know that you have support. You’ll need a provider with the ability to support your organization now and in the future.

Technology and Health Benefits

Technology has come a long way and there are a number of ways that it can make life easier for you and your administration team as you support your employees with health benefits. Good technology can also improve the benefits experience for your employees as they interact with and use the health benefits plan.

• Online Enrollment – The creation of Canada’s first online enrollment platform (Enrol-ME) was ground-breaking. GroupHEALTH developed the platform after recognizing that technology could really improve the process for both you (the Plan Sponsor) and your employees.

Enrol-ME guides employees through the process of enrolling in the employee health benefits plan. Employees can click for information about a specific field, and they are prompted for missing information. They can start enrollment and then pick up where they left off if they can’t complete the full enrollment at one time.

Online enrollment plays a significant role in making implementing and administering health benefits easy. It removes the need for your plan administrator to transfer information from hand-written enrollment forms into the system (not to mention the need to decipher those forms!).

It also significantly decreases the need to manage employees in completing the enrollment process. Because the process is online, employees receive reminder e-mails and follow-ups, and your Plan Administrator can quickly and easily see which employees have not finished the enrollment process.

• Online Plan Administration – Online plan administration with GroupHEALTH’s WEBS online can make things easy. Using an online platform increases efficiency because plan activities can be completed from anywhere, on any device. Not only does this make remote work an option, it also removes the need for your plan administrator to search through paper files for documentation.

An online platform for plan administration means your Plan Administrator can automate key tasks and day-to-day duties to save time and money. With WEBS online, your plan administrator receives alerts and notifications about important deadlines so nothing is missed; for example, the system may send an alert if a new employee has not enrolled in the benefits plan and the eligibility period for enrollment is coming to an end. The system also prompts your Plan Administrator through processes and offers help along the way. These types of features help make administering the plan easy.

Electronic billing statements are the other difference maker. Your Plan Administrator can request unique sorting of the billing statement so that the statement is organized in a way that makes sense for your company. This may mean sorting via different locations, employee classes, or other ways of breaking down the users. This helps makes administering the plan easy because your Plan Administrator does not have to sort and reconcile multiple bills, from multiple insurers.

• Employee Portal – An employee portal and mobile app make it easy for your employees to access and interact with your health benefits plan. Employees can access benefits coverage information and view balance remaining for specific benefits; this way they know how much coverage they have available.

They can also submit claims and receive electronic reimbursement. Employees simply take a photo or scan of their receipt and upload it. They can track the process of the claim and receive a direct deposit for reimbursement. This makes claims easy, hassle-free and convenient for plan members.

• Training and Support – >One of the keys to implementing and administering health benefits the easy way is to have training and support from your provider. Technology plays a big role in making health benefits easy, but if you, your administration team and your employees don’t know how to use it properly, then it’s useless.

At GroupHEALTH, we offer training for your Plan Administrator on how to use the enrollment platform and administration system. We also have a large database of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and well as a Plan Administration Knowledgebase. The PA Knowledgebase can be accessed from anywhere; it provides information and tools to efficiently administer the plan, along with policies, procedures, tips and best practices.

Implementing and administering health benefits the easy way means you must have access to telephone, e-mail and in-person support for anything related to the health benefits plan.

Good Advice is Key

If “easy” isn’t one of the words you’d use to describe administering your health benefits plan, then maybe it’s time to look further. If you don’t have access to technology and support, you’re missing out. Explore your options with one of our licensed advisors on the phone, or contact us for a comparison quote.

Whether you’re looking for extended health and dental coverage, disability coverage, or life and critical illness coverage, GroupHEALTH has affordable benefits packages that work as hard as you do.