Related: 4 trends crucial to optimizing health care plans emerge from pandemic-driven data

Here's how aggregated health data can inform your decisions during each of these important phases, without accessing any personally identifiable health information.

1. Use data to design your plans

Is your workforce susceptible to specific illnesses or conditions? What are your population's current needs and care gaps? Can you identify recurring claims and reveal the most common conditions affecting your employee population by analyzing your health data?

Consider an organization that employs a large group of dedicated runners. In turn, the employer has a seemingly healthy employee population. Although there are very few immediate health concerns, analytics may show that this employee segment is at an increased risk for orthopedic issues. Equipped with this knowledge, the organization can more accurately forecast future needs and better customize its plan. In this case, the employer might opt to offer a solution or vendor that incorporates on-site physical therapy, or they may ensure their medical plan covers adequate physical therapy visits to address common MSK injuries.

Or let's say you're deciding whether to offer a voluntary benefit like family-planning coverage (e.g., fertility, adoption, or fostering). Would family-planning benefits contribute to your employee well-being and loyalty? Or does your data show that this benefit would go unused by your team?

When you understand your population's current conditions and future risks, along with your current care gaps, you can design plans to better fit the unique needs of your people. And with optimized wellness programs — that acknowledge and address your employees' greatest concerns — you can better engage your team with your offerings.

2. Leverage data to select ideal programs and point solutions

Which programs and point solutions will support the needs of your workforce? If you want to make confident vendor selections, you need to understand your people's wellness interests and health care needs.

For example, let's say you're a benefits leader in the transportation industry. Generalized data from the CDC shows that truck drivers are twice as likely to report having diabetes compared with other U.S. workers. If you identify a care gap like medication noncompliance or failure to receive recommended lab testing, your organization might decide to offer diabetes education and an integrated diabetes management program. Research shows that diabetes management programs can reduce annual medical costs and improve receipt of recommended screenings — improving the health of your employees and your bottom line.

If the first point highlighted the importance of data to select plans for your people as a whole, this point focuses on the outliers: leveraging data to identify substantial (though distinctive) populations that require specific needs. This type of analysis allows for more inclusive and effective program management as a whole.

3. Analyze data to assess impact and ROI

Even if you use data to design your plans and select ideal programs to fit the needs of your employee population, that doesn't guarantee success or positive outcomes. You won't know if your benefits programs are successful unless you can clearly measure defined outcomes.

How do you track program engagement and identify opportunities to tailor your communications and measure outcomes?

First, use data to speak to the greatest needs and concerns of your people. If your employee population regularly experiences low back pain or rheumatoid arthritis, reference these specific conditions and the corresponding programs or resources in your internal communications and benefits materials. As you deploy tailored messaging, assess employee engagement by analyzing things like reading and open rates for email messaging and time on content for videos.

Likewise, it's important to measure program engagement and effectiveness. You absolutely want to track and measure the use and outcomes of wellness and preventive screenings included in your plan under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (e.g., preventive screenings for breast and colorectal cancer). But you should also be sure to measure engagement with — and the effectiveness and outcomes of — interventions and education provided by third-party vendors for which your enrolled employees are eligible. The best example might be diabetes management. After all, CDC numbers show that over 1 in 10 U.S. adults have diabetes, and roughly 1 in 3 have prediabetes. Another good example is MSK (musculoskeletal) conditions. These are estimated to affect 1 in 2 U.S. adults, costing an estimated $213 billion annually for treatment, care, and lost wages.

When you analyze all of your health analytics — including those from third-party vendors — you can begin to see the true impact and outcomes of screenings and education on your organization's overall health care spend, on employee health care compliance, and on your population's overall health. This level of correlation can help your organization illustrate direct ROI from any health or wellness program and justify the investment, helping you continually improve and design more customized plans.

Where should you begin?

Start by identifying your most pressing questions. Then determine what you need to measure. Historically, health data analytics have empowered HR and benefits leaders to more effectively answer these three questions:

1. What are my population's current needs and care gaps?
2. Which programs or point solutions will support the needs of my workforce?
3. How can we track program engagement and identify opportunities to tailor communications?

When you track and analyze your employee health analytics, you can design plans that are customized for your population.

As the pandemic has emphasized, employee well-being is a necessity, not a luxury. Health data analytics enable HR and benefits leaders to create the plans and select the programs they need to improve the health of their unique population, support organizational goals, and foster an exceptional employee experience — putting employee well-being front and center.

Jennifer Jones, MSM RD, is population health practice Leader at Springbuk and an experienced health care professional with a background in clinical dietetics, wellness programming, and employer health. With over 20 years of experience, she has worked in various settings, including health care systems, occupational health organizations, and health and welfare benefits advisory firms.

Read more: 

• Data analytics offers a peek behind the curtain in employee benefits plans
• How willing are employees to share their data? Depends on the age.
• Fixing health care hinges on data, transparency