“Change” has become the new normal across industries, including the group benefits industry, predominantly because of the ongoing technological advancements. The group benefits industry is integrating new technologies in its landscape both actively and strategically to provide better healthcare services to consumers—enhancing the quality of lives of consumers, and lowering health care cost, significantly.
Let’s dig in deeper to learn how technology is being used by the group benefits industry and how employers and employees are benefitting from it…
Introduction of New Communication Technologies for Educating Plan Members
Educating and informing employees regarding benefits costs and assisting them in becoming smarter consumers is an integral part of the greater wellness and health goal. And this is exactly why we continue to see group benefits providers proactively investing in new communication technologies such as custom member portals, mobile apps and user-friendly websites.
These technological tools provide users with increasingly interactive and educational mediums to learn more about healthcare, share information related to health issues & new initiatives, and besides this, features like live chat enable employees to access information, right away and get timely support when needed.
Applications for Supporting Good Employee Health
Previously, employers had no proper means for measuring the effectiveness and ROIs on wellness support programs and incentives that they offered to employees. However, today, employers can evaluate the effectiveness of employee wellness programs easily through a variety of mobile apps that combine wellness and data recording & analysis. For instance, there are applications that track weight loss, distance run, calories eaten and heart rate of users.
Employers can use these applications to offer better employee wellness support while tracking their usage and effectiveness. Besides this, as these applications are highly-interactive, they help in boosting employee engagement which is much needed to keep employees motivated in achieving their health and fitness goals.
Diminishing Health Issues and Managing Health Proactively
Employers and group benefits carriers are using technology to manage health of employees in a better way. Different technology platforms have been introduced to maintain employee health records and details. This data is harnessed to access meaningful insights, for managing health of the employees proactively.
Here’s how: based on the data collected, if employers see a trend in claims related to mental health, they can take quick actions to lower this problem by seeking assistance from mental health experts so that they can provide preventative support and information sessions to their employees.
Additionally, the data can also be used to track care better by creating digital health alerts for employees, informing them when their dental or physical checkup is due. All these proactive approaches can truly help in improving the health of employees, and lowering healthcare costs that may arise due to poor healthcare management.
