In 2018, companies will face two significant challenges. First, health care costs will continue to skyrocket. Rising costs have already forced employers to look for alternate ways to offer health solutions that keep costs low — including offering only high-deductible plans and shifting more of the financial burden to employees.
Second, the idea of a health benefit is changing. Employees want benefits that extend beyond insurance, and it's been well documented that millennials place more importance on the benefits offered by a company than other factors such as salary or stock options. As health care costs continue to rise and the definition of a health benefit expands, smart employers are getting ahead of the curve by adopting the following three practices.
1. Becoming providers
Employers have already become payers; this year, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that on average, employers are paying 70 percent of health insurance for single coverage. Additionally, the cost of a health incident, such as a cancer diagnosis or high-risk pregnancy, can cost a company millions of dollars. Because of this, companies are choosing not to send their employees into the system at all, and instead, becoming providers themselves.
Recommended For You
Put simply, it is more cost effective for an employer to create onsite clinics with salaried medical professionals or to partner with programs or apps that can provide or guide their employees' care. There has been an increase of innovative employer wellness programs to help keep employees healthy, and these types of programs will continue to flourish and grow.
2. Focusing on engagement
ROI has typically been measured by hard numbers — such as time and cost — but in 2018, we'll see more health programs measured by engagement. The fallacy is that we have all of the hard data we need to measure the success of health programs, but it's not as easy as you might think to figure out the average cost or incident rate is for certain diseases or conditions.
As companies begin to measure comprehensive health benefits, as opposed to only health insurance, ROI will be measured by engagement. Employers will stop thinking about how much money did I spend or how much did I save, and instead think about the value people are receiving from the benefits. And, beyond everything else, engagement can be measured. When you engage more people and they are using a platform daily, logging their health information in real-time, you can measure outcomes and, importantly, predict future outcomes.
3. Prioritizing personalization and integration
People expect personalization in every aspect of their lives. You wouldn't log into Facebook and look at a feed that wasn't yours, searching through hundreds of updates to find the one update that was from someone you know. This is exactly what unpersonalized benefits programs ask employees to do. But it's more than just personalizing — that personalized program needs to be integrated with all of the other health programs so that everything works together, seamlessly. You have to provide benefits in the way that people want to consume them. Right now, this doesn't happen.
For example, short term disability does not talk to your traditional insurer program, and your medical benefit doesn't talk to your perks program. In 2018, companies will need think about the benefits experience they are creating for their employees and implement a personalized, integrated ecosystem that can be accessed at any point of a health journey.
We've seen progress from the small number of companies at the forefront of innovation — becoming providers, using platforms and programs that are personalized and integrated — and we're also seeing results (increased engagement). Expect to see more companies adopt these three practices in 2018 to better control the cost of health care, and manage the health and wellness of their employees.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
