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What Your Decision-Support Tool Says about You

Ben Renner

Ben Renner

how are decision-support tools designedDecision-support tools have gained in popularity in recent years because of their ease of use and their end results. How well your employee portals and health insurance sign-up features work affects workplace culture, employee benefits, and your overall internal brand.

Many of these products take the daunting task of sifting through all available health care options and boil it down into a few simple questions and tidy options bolstered with all the prescient information an employee needs to make the right benefit choice for themselves and their families. Decision-support tools are necessary, especially in today’s uncertain healthcare climate, because most employees (and people in general) don’t want to strain their eyes and hurt their brains wading through the complicated insurance world.

Decision-Support Tools Increase Enrollment

The logic behind this is simple. If it’s fast and easy to sign up for health insurance, more of your employees will do it. Enrollment of course depends on a number of other factors as well, such as the demographics of your workforce (young, old, families, single, etc.) and your health insurance options. But creating a way for your employees to understand their benefits when they sign up for them makes a huge difference, as does making the sign-up process as streamlined as possible.

decision-support tools increase enrollmentIt’s been proven that giving employees the support they need to make informed decisions about their healthcare increases engagement and enrollment. Getting ahead of the yearly rush to enroll in health insurance coverage produces big-time ROI for your employee health plan.

Spread the Goodwill

Beyond the obvious benefit to your organization of having an insured and well-informed workforce, your organization will benefit of removing stress and confusion from the enrollment process. Signing up for healthcare, whether over a state exchange or choosing from employer options, can hang over a workforce. The stress, even after the enrollment period is over, can linger, affecting employees and their work in unpredictable ways.

Sending out packets of information and assuming employees will use that information, however complete it may be, to make strategic decisions on their health insurance is wishful thinking. There will always be the diligent employee who makes it their mission to crunch the numbers and make the right decision, but if you want everyone to participate in your healthcare plan, you need to make sure everyone gets customized options and information. Decision-support tools are a way organizations can put people first.

Putting Concerns to Rest

HR managers and company owners sometimes have concerns about decision-support tools. Is boiling down this highly complex information into a few questions and options missing critical data points and breezing past healthcare options that might be advantageous to some employees? Wouldn’t sending out a packet of all the information and healthcare options be more complete? At least all the information would be there. As with any product or service, you get what you pay for. The best decision-support tools are built on algorithms that automatically sort through the information and present the information that the customer needs in a thoughtful way.

You can find all sorts of decision-support tools out there. Soon, they’ll be ubiquitous in corporations. Test them, get feedback, ask questions, and zero in on the system that will engage and delight your employees.

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