You should be getting these from your employee benefits broker.

Shopping the market for competitive quotes and dealing with claim problems is only a fraction of what your insurance broker/consultant should be providing your organization, your employees and their families. At Broad Reach Benefits we go much further. Our consulting, service, support and technology will streamline the administration of your benefit plans, help you stay in compliance and improve communication with your employees.

1) Strategic 3-5 Year Benefit Plan

Stop the year-to-year renewal game and put a strategy in place. That marketing spreadsheet you get at renewal time is not a strategy. You should get a complete health care strategy that defines cost management strategies that will provide your company with direct savings to your medical, disability and workers compensation premiums and provide you with indirect savings in areas such as absenteeism, overtime, recruitment and retention. You may not be able to keep your overall health care costs from increasing, but you can certainly reduce the impact of future increases.

2) Medical Plan Real-Time Data Analytics

Instead of rearview mirror reporting from your carrier or TPA that looks good but doesn’t really provide actionable data, you should be getting real-time unified medical claims, Rx claims, onsite clinic data, biometric screening data, and more reporting to ensure that you’re getting a full view of your entire population’s health. With Data Analystics platform in place you’ll get actionable insights into your group’s health throughout the year. You’ll never sit through another presentation reviewing last years data and asking “so now what do we do?”.

3) An Employee Communication Web Portal Integrated with Your Payroll and HRIS Systems

Your employees should have one place to go for all their benefits information. Each customized portal is branded with your company’s logos and color scheme. Employees will be able to review their plan designs, enroll for their benefits online (no more paper!),print claim forms, watch customized educational videos about your benefits, retrieve benefit summaries, view their SPDs, read FAQs, access medical research, get carrier contact information for all your benefits and links to carriers web sites.

These self-service portals significantly reduce the amount of time human resources needs to spend administering the benefits freeing them up for more strategic functions. Your employees will now have complete 24/7 secure access to all the information needed to learn, plan and make benefits decisions.

4) One-Call Customer Service

Staff that knows who you are without your policy number, deals with the carriers for you, and gets you answers without delay.

5) Financial Performance Assessments Through the Year

You should have detailed reports, metrics and analysis throughout the year on how your plan is performing so that you are never surprised at renewal time.

6) Employee Education (That Actually Works!)

If your experience is where the broker brings in the carrier group rep for a dry, marginally helpful and totally un-motivating presentation, then you should be getting benefit training for your employees that provides tangible results:

• Gets the employees to feel good about their benefits
• Changes the member experience for your employees and their dependents
• Tells the employees not just what the benefit are, but how to use them
• Help employees see how they are on the same team as you are
• Help them see how to make better, more intelligent and efficient usage of their benefits

7) Technology Consulting, Tools and Support

Today’s employee benefits broker needs to understand and use the latest cutting-edge technology to deliver the consulting expertise you need. Making sure your payroll, accounting, HRIS and employee benefit online enrollment systems talk to each other is essential to streamline and dramatically reduce input and administrative time.

8) Professional Objectivity

Is your broker predisposed to select one or two specific carriers? Many carriers give perks and bonuses to those brokers who book certain levels of business with them. Does your broker participate in co-marketing programs with a carrier or receive overrides? Is your broker working on a commission basis? If so they may not be motivated to represent your best interests.

Paying compensation as a percentage of premiums (commissions) ties the broker’s compensation to medical inflation which makes zero sense. We believe compensation should be based on a fixed fee arrangement which aligns your interests and ours.

9) People Who Are A Pleasure To Work With

Is working with your benefits broker and their staff an enjoyable experience? If not perhaps you should hear what our clients say about working with us. Click here to read our testimonials.