Workforce:
5,600 benefits-eligible employees in dozens of locations working around the clock.
Industry: Healthcare
The Challenge
The primary objective was to ensure that employees had the support needed to make an informed choice among three new plan offerings. The addition of HDHP plans meant they needed to educate employees about the value of the low-cost HDHP options.
To meet their budget, they needed to achieve the enrollment outcomes predicted by their consultant and actuary—that 65% of employees would select the traditional PPO, with at least 35% enrolling in one of the two HDHPs.
Financial incentives are an important element to control costs in a community of medical professionals, which actuaries and underwriters typically know to be a higher-than-average-cost population.
Nebraska Medicine’s plan was to bend their cost trend favorably through consumer-rewarded behavior.
The Solution
Nebraska Medicine considered several educational strategies and decision-support tools, but quickly settled on PLANselect for its quick and straightforward user experience, easy-to-follow results display, affordability and custom content and branding.
After the initial setup, Nebraska Medicine confirmed through PLANselect’s testing and
“heatmap” analysis that the algorithm results supported their desired objectives.
Nebraska Medicine chose to introduce their new plan options with PLANselect a month prior to the official start of open enrollment, allowing the employees time to digest and consider their new plan options.
The Results
By the start of open enrollment, about 3,300 employee users had already logged into PLANselect to review their plans, and the total number of users exceeded 5,000 by the end of OE, nearly a one-to-one relationship of “users to employees.”
As importantly, using PLANselect to educate employees about the HDHP options produced stunning results with 81% of employees enrolling in HSA-eligible plans (far exceeding the actuarial estimate of 35%).
What’s next? As a self-funded employer, Nebraska Medicine will track their claims costs closely.
Their expectation is a reduction in projected trends by at least 2% as employees are careful about discretionary expenses and watch their HSA balances closely. When that threshold is met, Nebraska Medicine will beat their initially budgeted claims expense by over $2 million, making their modest investment in PLANselect earn a huge return.
Testimonial:
“This is awesome! Thank
you so much! I definitely
believe PLANselect
helped to guide plan
members to the HSA
plans, which is exactly
what we wanted.”
Laurie Wilburn
Total Rewards and HR Operations Director
