It’s fall. I live in the South. Therefore, my family and I live and breathe football at this time of the year. That means football practice 3x a week, Friday night high school football tailgating, Saturday morning 7th-grade football game and Saturday afternoon college football. And you know what? It also means conversations with other parents about the need to access and utilize their group insurance benefits.
What? Football and insurance
Wait. What? Football and insurance? Yes, it’s not just for Allstate and its “Mayhem” commercials. (You gotta love those!) It’s true that football and accident insurance are like PB&J – they just work well together. But I was surprised last weekend when I had a conversation with a physician assistant who didn’t know the value or purpose of accident insurance. I also spoke with another family who has four kids in contact sports – many with college recruiters looking at them – who didn’t know the value of both hospital indemnity and accident insurance.
Week after week we go to the football games and invariably someone gets hurt. I’ve seen a child succumb to severe dehydration during a particularly hot game and be admitted to the emergency room, another child ended up with a broken leg when he was tackled during a kick, and a number of kids with other injuries.
Peace of mind in a moment of need
When your child or loved one is injured, insurance isn’t what anyone thinks of first. But wouldn’t it be unique in that moment of need if they had a sense of financial calm knowing that their deductible might be covered through accident insurance? Or what about the hospital stay that ends up with a bigger than expected out-of-pocket expense? Hospital indemnity insurance can help with that. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have a connected view of all the insured benefits in one place?
When a carrier provides multiple lines of group and voluntary insurance to an employer, the ideal situation would be to have a core system that can manage group, voluntary and absence at the same time. Then, the policy administration system could see all the group, voluntary and absence policies and connect the dots for each employee, so that the accident insurance and hospital indemnity insurance were triggered for the same event – all on the insured’s behalf.
Connected claims, employee engagement and satisfaction
It’s nearly time for U.S. employees to select their 2024 benefit options during open enrollment. I can’t help but wonder what impact this single pane of glass view could have on the choices employees make.
As an employee, I know I’d be highly likely to select a full roster of offered benefits if someone put the following use case in front of me:
- a child athlete who breaks a leg
- needs orthopedic surgery
- required someone to take time off work for their doctor visits and physical therapy
- and every single one of these claims situations was handled proactively, concurrently and swiftly by the carrier.
Done. I’m sold. Sign me up.
Employee engagement remains a huge barrier to employee benefit adoption. It’s not just about text messaging and portal access. It’s about connecting the claims and processing the claims in a way that’s frictionless for the employee.
Connected claim events can give employees a sense of security and well-being that they are maximizing their insurance and thus, intrinsically feel protected and well cared for by their employer. The event can trigger the notifications to the employee, creating a frictionless experience with optimized utilization of their benefits. Might this be the key to employee engagement? The irony is that this isn’t science fiction, but a real opportunity with the FINEOS Platform.
How FINEOS can help insurers to help employers
While many insurers are grappling with the multiple levels of improving utilization, the FINEOS Platform aids many others in achieving both utilization and automation. For example, customers using FINEOS Claims find that any claim event will trigger whatever benefits may be applicable for the event, not just the one for which the insured is submitting a claim. This achieves the proactivity that insurers and customers want and need. FINEOS has also successfully integrated medical data into one of our client’s supplemental health claims processing, resulting in nearly 70% auto-adjudication of supplemental health claims. In this instance, the insurer’s parent company is a health insurer, but the logic to make all the needs work and trigger benefits automatically resides in FINEOS Claims.
Contact us today if your priority is increasing supplemental health utilization and automation in processing claims.
