BENEFITS BUSINESS
By Len Strazewski
Online administrative help can be a real value-added
Employee benefit managers are going to pay some serious attention to the agent or broker who promises some relief with new, high-tech administrative support from their insurers.
Long hours, late executive decisions and last minute administrative details--that litany has become part of the work life of human resource and employee benefits managers during the economic doldrums of the 21st Century.
Faced with reduced administrative staff, budget cutbacks and pressure to do more with fewer resources, corporate employee benefit departments and senior executives of smaller companies are under more stress than ever in managing their employee benefits programs.
And as a result, they are going to pay some serious attention to the agent or broker who promises some relief with new, high-tech administrative support from their insurers, says Brian Neary, assistant vice president and director of customer service applications in group benefits at the Hartford Financial Services Group in Simsbury, Connecticut.
"Technology has become one of the most important ways insurers and their producers differentiate themselves from competitors," he says "As our clients come under more and more pressure to provide service to employees and administer a more complicated range of benefits, it has become critical for insurers and their agents and brokers to give them the technology tools they need."
Internet access to information is not a new idea in the employee benefits business but, until recently, most online services have centered on health benefits and individual participants. Insurers, managed care health plans and independent consumer health companies have been providing health and medical information online since the mid-1990s and health Web sites have been among the most popular of all Web sites.
However, only in the past couple of years have insurers and other health plans begun to use the Internet to provide powerful administrative support for employers rather than medical information for employees. In response to growing demand to lighten the load of employee benefits managers, health and disability insurers have been developing new Internet-based portal sites or expanding their existing consumer sites to provide fast and secure administrative services to employers.
For the past three years, The Harford has been promoting EmployerView, an online customer support system for its group life insurance and disability benefits customers. In July, the insurer announced the beginning of a series of enhancements that Neary says will provide its agents and brokers with new marketing opportunities--as well as support its overworked clients.
The insurer has expanded availability of its online E-Bill and E-Pay services, previously available to large, self-administered groups, to groups of 10 lives or more in two of its biggest states, New York and New Jersey, with more expansion coming soon.
The insurer also plans to increase the sites' functionality to allow management of multiple work locations for large employers and to build a "Center for Action" that will allow employers to generate a broader range of ad hoc reports and respond to management requests for information.
EmployerView was originally designed with three goals in mind, Neary says. First, the Hartford wanted to develop an integrated technology-based delivery system that would establish the company as a market leader in an intensely competitive environment. While employers may have been slow to adopt new technologies in the past, economic pressure is leading them to access new tools their vendors make available, he says.
Second, the insurer wanted to develop tools that would lighten the administrative burden on its employer customers and its producers who often pick up the load from their clients.
Third, the insurer wanted to increase the level of information available to employees to help them make more informed decisions about the purchase and use of their benefits. This has been a growing trend in employee benefits as employees and their employees move toward greater self-service and self-management of their benefits.
In addition to the E-Pay and E-bill services, EmployerView provides employers with password-protected, online, immediate access to case information, participant administration, claims inquiries, medical underwriting progress and a series of group reports.
The service also provides an online database of administrative kits, including enrollment forms, domestic partner affidavits and other application documentation and a library of group booklets, certificates, endorsements and policy/plan documents.
More than 8,000 employer groups have signed up for the EmployerView services, Neary says, and about 3,000 of those groups are now using theE-pay and E-billing service.
Shamus O'Keefe, senior account executive with Hartford Life in Detroit, Michigan, says the EmployerView technology has been a great addition to the services he provides and a very positive way to differentiate Hartford and its agents and brokers from other life and disability insurance producers. His office has signed up about 350 groups for EmployerView and has been adding new groups at a rate of about 120 per year since the inception of the service.
The E-pay and E-bill services provide a new opportunity for producers to revisit their customers and their employee benefits programs, he adds, something every agent and broker needs in the competitive employee benefits sales environment.
O'Keefe says the system consolidates a wide range of resources for his employer groups, including the database of claims forms, plan booklets and other documentation that provides instant access to everyday printed materials that customers are always asking for.
However, O'Keefe admits that the technology does not exactly sell itself. Employee benefit managers and human resource managers are so swamped with administrative duties that getting them to review the technology can be difficult.
"Like anything else, the technology has to be sold to them, demonstrated in such a way that they can see its applications within their own system," he says. "Employers need to understand how the online resources and applications can lighten their load, not just give them one new system to learn."
Hartford also provides a similar product for access by agents and brokers, ProducerView, which allows agents and brokers password-protected online access to their group account information, administrative kits and reference material they need for their clients.
In August, MetLife in New York followed suit with a new version of MetLink, its own employee benefits administration portal site for group customers. Employee benefits managers and human resource executives have been using the site to conduct benefit enrollment, check claims status and generate management reports.
The new version now includes more powerful reporting functions and a simplified registration function that lets employers add employee information and update coverage, the company says.
The upgrades also include more access to disability claims in forms that can support productivity and absence management metrics, notes Jim Gemus, senior vice president of institutional business.
The site is available to 6,000 of Metlife's institutional employers and is already in use by 14,000 employee benefit managers nationwide, he says. The site also complements MetLife's MyBenefits, an employee portal.
Online administrative services are not just offered by the big national insurers. Also in July, Advantage Health Solutions, Inc., in Indianapolis, a regional managed care health plan, began providing its employer customers, medical providers and agents and brokers with Internet access to a long list of administrative functions.
Its online health management system was developed by HealthTrio in Nashville, Tennessee, and allows agents, brokers and employers to manage employee groups online, including group registration and enrollment, direct payment programs and premium billing and other billing.
The system also supports management of provider contracts and capitation arrangements, provider referrals and authoriza-tions, case management and medical claims management and coordination of benefits. All functions are HIPAA compliant.
"Members, employers, providers and brokers have been searching for online services that save them time and add real value," says Vicki Perry, president and chief executive officer of Advantage Health. "It has been our experience that basic online services do not meet these needs, so we decided to take our Internet initiative to the next level."
Perry expects that the new system will also reduce call center volume and reduce the administrative costs of claims and provider referrals. *
The author
Len Strazewski has been covering employee benefits issues for more than 20 years and is employee benefits editor of Human Resource Executive magazine. He has an M.A. in Industrial Relations from Loyola University.