New Features Help Employees Select Optimal Health Plan and Reduce Their OOP Healthcare Expenses
Our goal in developing software tools like PLANselect® is to make benefits open enrollment as quick, easy and cost effective as possible for both employers and their employees, which means we’re constantly looking for ways to expand and improve the user experience. Thanks to feedback from our broker partners and employer customers, we’re excited to announce newly released features for PLANselect to help meet existing and developing needs.
HSAdvantage Helps Employees Optimize Their HSA Investment
We’ve seen firsthand the increasing number of organizations offering HDHPs (high-deductible health plans) and CDHPs (consumer-directed health plans), many of which include tax-exempt HSAs (health savings accounts). It quickly became clear that users were missing valuable information regarding HSAs and the impact they have on understanding a plan’s value score, namely how users can optimize their HSA contributions to cover estimated out-of-pocket (OOP) costs, maximize their tax savings or take advantage of available employer contributions. PLANselect now includes HSAdvantage, an HSA-calculator tool that takes the annual estimated out-of-pocket expenses derived by the PLANselect algorithm and with a few additional bits of information—including whether the user is 55 or over, what their state and federal tax rates are, and HSA employer contributions, if any—it calculates HSA-contribution recommendations. These recommendations are then broken down by how much it would cost the user per paycheck based on pay cycle and what the tax savings for each would be. Altogether, HSAdvantage helps PLANselect provide users with a complete picture of the benefits and drawbacks of each option their company offers. The HSAdvantage tools will also be offered to employers on a standalone basis for the upcoming enrollment season. To demo the PLANselect decision tool with HSAdvantage, visit the demo site here.
Spanish-Speaking Employees Need Help, Too
Communicating benefits plan options effectively is difficult even before language differences enter the equation. Decision-support tools are becoming a vital part of benefits selection as healthcare grows increasingly complex. But for employers with significant Spanish-speaking populations, finding the right tool can also be an expensive challenge, especially with time-consuming avatar-cartoon-type products that take 30 to 40 minutes for employees to complete. We’ve made PLANselect easily accessible to both English- and Spanish-speaking workforces. Each step of the process has the ability to toggle quickly between English and Spanish, keeping everything simple and streamlined for all users. You can switch back and forth as many times as necessary and even from question to question without the need to re-enter your answers. Even the new HSAdvantage tool can toggle between the two languages.
