Today's benefits consultant hasbeen tasked with bringing innovation to their clients that canreduce risk or reduce costs associated with their client employer'shealth care expense.  An employer'shistorical and present-day data will contain evidentiaryinformation that can drive future risk management strategies;however, many analytics platforms do not necessarily yield detailedinstructions concerning actionable items found within the dataanalysis.  Many platforms can add numbers and rank costdrivers but deriving the pearls of actionability from the dataplatform oftentimes requires expertise in various disciplines(i.e., epidemiology, wellness, insurance, etc.).  Based onthis fact, how can a benefits consultant become familiar withnavigating and deriving risk management innovations through the useof advanced data analytics?   It all begins withdeveloping an understanding of the evolution of risk and potentialsolutions that can be paired with this risk for amelioration.

In order to better understand bringing meaningful use to data,it all begins with the question “What is driving costs orrisk?”  And the second question is: “What can I do aboutit?”

Below is a simple analysis (Table 1) that segments a largeemployer's medical spend into 10 separate spendingranges.  At first glance, in 2014 and 2015, approximately60 percent of the population spent less than $900 annually, yetonly accounted for less than 4 percent of the overallexpenditures.  The portion of the population that isdriving the overall costs are the groups spending between $5,000and greater than $50,000.  These groups accounted for 85percent of the overall expenditure in 2014, and only 16.8 percentof the population in 2014 accounted for this major expenditure. Thetrend holds fairly steady in 2015.