Are you focusing too much on your company’s benchmarking results?
Trying to directly compete with other industry leaders could hurt the true potential of your benefits offerings. When evaluating your benefits packages, benchmarking should be used as a tool, but relying solely on benchmarking cannot provide a complete picture of the unique healthcare needs and utilization patterns of your employees.
By going beyond traditional benchmarking and incorporating a healthcare data analysis, you can unlock valuable insights, tailor benefits offerings, and make data-driven decisions that positively impact both your employees' well-being and your bottom line.
What is benchmarking?
Employee benefits benchmarking allows you to measure, evaluate and compare your employee benefits program against industry standards and best practices. It involves analyzing key metrics and performance indicators, such as benefit plan designs, contribution levels, employee participation rates, and wellness programs.
Employee benefits benchmarking enables your business to gauge the competitiveness and effectiveness of your benefit plans. Benchmarking provides valuable insights into industry trends, enabling companies to stay ahead of the curve and enhance employee satisfaction and attract top talent.
But benchmarking alone isn’t enough to predict how your benefits will compare and be most impactful. When paired together with healthcare data, you can gain an in-depth understanding of your utilization and take away actionable insights.
The Value of Your Healthcare Data
Your healthcare data provides you with valuable insight into your employee’s overall health and plan utilization. Sources such as claims data, health risk assessments and biometric screenings allow your organization to identify areas where your employee population is at risk. This allows you to offer targeted wellness solutions to help prevent and manage certain conditions.
The data that is available to you also provides an understanding of how your employees are utilizing your benefits plans. This is helpful when trying to understand and address common areas of overspending or gaps in coverage.
When paired with benchmarking data, the insights from your data can help you enhance employee satisfaction, attract and retain top talent, and promote a culture of well-being within your organization.
The Dynamic Pairing: Benchmarking and Your Data
Pairing benchmarking and healthcare data in the context of employee benefits can yield significant advantages for organizations. By combining these two sources of information, you can accomplish the following:
Comprehensive Overview
Benchmarking provides a broader industry perspective, highlighting how your benefit plans compare to competitors. Healthcare data, on the other hand, offers specific insights into employees’ healthcare utilization patterns and needs. Pairing both sources provides a comprehensive understanding of the current landscape, enabling organizations to make informed decisions.
Targeted Improvements
Benchmarking identifies areas where your company may be falling behind industry standards. By analyzing healthcare data alongside benchmarking, you can pinpoint specific areas within your benefit plans that require improvement. For example, if healthcare data indicates low utilization of preventive services, you can tailor your plan to encourage greater participation in wellness programs.
Cost Optimization
Combining benchmarking with healthcare data can help you identify cost-saving opportunities. By analyzing healthcare utilization patterns, you can assess the effectiveness of your benefit plans in managing costs. Benchmarking data can then provide insights into industry best practices that can help you optimize your plans, negotiate better rates with insurers, or consider alternative options to reduce expenses.
Personalized Benefit Offerings
Healthcare data enables your organization to understand employees' unique healthcare needs and preferences. By pairing this data with benchmarking, you can customize your benefit offerings to better align with your employee demographics and requirements. This customization enhances employee satisfaction, engagement, and overall well-being.
Proactive Risk Management
Your healthcare data can reveal potential risks and identify areas where preventive measures can be taken. Benefits benchmarking data adds a comparative dimension, showing how other organizations mitigate risks and implement successful risk management strategies. This pairing allows you to proactively address risks within your benefit plans and develop comprehensive risk management approaches.
Insights That Drive Better Employee Health Engagement.
Ascela’s experts can assist you throughout the benchmarking and data analytics process, providing expertise, access to industry tools, and tailored analysis to help make data-driven decisions.
Tapping into your data allows you to tailor your plans to address the unique utilization trends in your employee population. Data can also help you identify the top cost drivers and adjust and adapt plans accordingly.
Contact our team today for a claims data assessment to identify ways to reduce costs and maximize your benefits package.