Thinking about employee health insurance renewals and their potential changes given where we are at with the COVID Pandemic can be all across the board, but as the following article describes that many will see big increases:

Cost of some employee insurance plans rising as high as 40%

It’s obviously an important issue and one employers self-funded and fully-insured plans should be considering.  But what should one look at?

The first thing would be to analyze your claims history during the pandemic and compare that to prior periods. Simple questions can lead to some interesting insights. For example:

• What services increased?
• What services decreased?
• Which services that changed should return to prior levels and what will that impact look like?
• Which services that changed may not return to prior levels and what might that impact look like?

These questions will lead you to begin to project utilization in the coming year and then dig deeper from:

• An overall employee health program perspective– will my employees be less healthy in the coming year, and what might that impact look like?
• Healthcare Utilization perspective – Will I see more costs in the coming year and higher utilization?
• Workforce Productivity perspective – Will this impact my workforce productivity?

And more.

Once you have a sense of where you are going, you can then determine what interventions you can put into place to create a better opportunity to improve health and lower or maintain costs. Examples might include:

• Adding, modifying or dropping various benefits to better meet the needs of your employees
• Targeted education programs
• Establishment of high quality narrow networks, etc.

At Accountable Health we have done analyses of groups as large as 675,000 lives looking at multiple years of inpatient, outpatient and pharmacy claims.

Call us to discuss our Claims Analysis services and how we can help you create a more effective benefits package and programs for your employees.