Digital health innovations are transforming the way people access healthcare services – so it’s only fitting that employers are increasingly turning to digital health to increase employee awareness and engagement with their health benefits. In fact, according to a recent survey, 68% of employers plan to invest more in digital solutions over the next five years. It’s a change that’s likely to excite many employees – 49% of employees surveyed said they’d be more likely to use a digital health solution if their employer offered it.

Now that we’ve completed our five-part blog series focused on optimizing your benefits plan, we hope you feel more informed and empowered to reduce the cost of employee benefits. Given the ever-increasing costs associated with healthcare, everyone needs to adopt the right option and develop the best strategy to save their business and employees.

Year after year, you watch the cost of your company’s group health insurance continue to rise. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average single and family premiums increased by 4% in 2020. Many employers searching for unconventional ways to offset costs are now considering alternative methods to funding their plans. Captive and consortium health plans offer two possible options of self-funding that can help contain costs and lower your overall risk. If you want to continue offering high-quality benefits and enjoy the advantages of a flexible self-funded program, these two options may be worth the consideration.

As we launch this fifth and final post in our Health Plan Cost Optimization series, let’s take a look at how captive and consortium health plans work, how they differ, and how they can help you save money on health plan costs.

As we launch this fourth post in our ongoing Health Plan Cost Optimization series, it’s time to take a closer look at self-funded insurance plans. Whether a fully insured or level-funded insurance plan isn’t right for your organization, or you need more information to make your final decision, we hope you find this look at self-funded plans helpful.

Traditionally, businesses looking for alternatives in health plan offerings faced a choice between conventional fully-funded plans and self-insured plans. If you’ve been searching for a way to limit your health plan costs but balked at the risks of a self-funded plan, you might want to consider a partially self-funded health plan. These plans borrow elements from both fully-funded and self-funded plans and offer a great stepping stone in the direction of self-funding.

Partially self-funded plans allow you to explore self-funding, lower your health plan costs and still provide high-quality benefits to your employees in the process.

Let’s take a look at partially self-funded plans, how they work, and how they can help your company save on health plan costs.

After discussing the fully insured model for health benefits in our first blog post of the series, you might want to learn more about some of the alternatives we discussed there, including level-funded insurance plans.

Is a level-funded plan right for your small-to-medium-sized business? Business leaders across all industries and sectors continually ask themselves the same question, wondering how to best serve their employees while cutting costs.

Let’s continue our series by taking a closer look at level-funded plans and what they can do for your organization and employees.

When companies try to save money, they typically look at their most significant expenses to see if they can trim them down.

Health insurance is likely one of the highest line items in your budget, whether you're a small or large business owner. Your payroll is probably higher, and depending on the type of company you have, equipment and maintenance might be more costly, but employee benefits are always up there.

And these costs continue to grow every year! According to projections by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, national health spending will increase by 5.5% per year until 2027.

So how can companies limit the ever-increasing costs of health insurance? Enter level-funding.

Once upon a time, perhaps a decade or so ago, benefits were a somewhat static monolith for businesses. Organizations instructed their HR teams and benefits managers to find the best health insurance plan for their employees across the board.

The options have grown leaps and bounds for employers to offer a spectrum of health insurance opportunities for their valued employees.

If you’ve ever heard employees complain about the high out-of-pocket costs of certain medical procedures or wondered how to keep their health plan costs from spiraling, you may have considered an alternative to traditional health plan offerings. Faced with inflated health plan costs, many companies are turning to an emerging alternative to traditional health plans, known as reference based pricing. If you want to manage healthcare costs while maintaining the same level of care and coverage for employees, it may be time to consider implementing a reference based pricing model.

Have you ever created an annual stewardship report? Are you familiar with them and all they can do to enhance your business and inspire your employees, organization, clients, and stakeholders?

An annual stewardship report serves as a tool to provide transparency in your operations to anyone who has a vested interest in your business, including the public. Businesses of all types and in all industries increasingly use annual stewardship reports to foster confidence, community engagement, and increased growth, socially and financially.

If you’re ready to start producing an annual stewardship report to provide transparency in your approach to benefits, keep reading to learn more.