When it comes to employee benefits, the impact of choosing a new insurance provider will be felt far beyond the price you pay or the network you choose. We’ve come up with some key factors that you’ll want to consider as a small and medium size business when it’s time to explore new insurance provider options.
Engage Your Employees
You don’t necessarily want to have to ask your employees to switch doctors or pay higher copays. Make your employees a part of the process. Engage them through a survey that will allow them to provide feedback on the types of employee benefits most important to them. The gap between what you think is important to your employee group and what they actually feel is important when it comes to group benefits might be significant. By engaging your employees and bringing them into the fold, you’re also solidifying their feelings of working for a company that cares about them, which can have a significant impact on employee retention.
What’s Their Network Like?
The key here is to determine what kind of network your new insurance provider offers. Is it a wider, more far reaching network, or a smaller network? As stand alone network options, one isn’t necessarily better than the other. However, when factoring in the picture painted from your employee engagement, total cost, and other factors you’ll start to see that certain networks make more sense than others. A thorough investigation of the type of network should be right near the top of your list when looking to switch insurance providers. It will help you pair down the employee benefit network options to specific providers that will offer the best value to your company and its employees.
Know Your Claims Utilization!
This one drives us absolutely bonkers! It’s almost a certainty with each prospective client we meet that they don’t have a firm handle on their past claims utilization. It’s madness. When looking to switch insurance providers, it’s critical to know what kind of claims history and risk pool your company will fall into. Why? By doing the research beforehand you’ll mitigate surprises as you move along your search for the best insurance value. If you discover that your claims history is not stellar, it may prevent you from wasting time on options that would be unavailable or cost prohibitive, allowing you to focus on the right set of benefit offerings given the health of your employee group. Claims history, or claims utilization, is something you can request from your current provider.
Click here if you’d like to watch a video series outlining these three keys to making an insurance provider switch.
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About Holloway Benefit Concepts
HBC was founded in early 2011 by Ryan Holloway. After serving over 8 years on active duty in the US Marine Corps, Ryan transitioned from being a full-time marine into an HR professional in early 2003. This began a journey and awoke a passion for helping companies who value their employees. After spending time working with a COBRA and FSA Administrator, an insurance company, and a large brokerage, Ryan realized that there were more unique and creative solutions for businesses than other companies were willing or able to realize. Seizing on his own entrepreneurial spirit, Ryan set out to found an independent agency designed to provide unique and original insurance solutions. To learn more about HBC, visit https://hollowaybenefitconcepts.com/
