Understanding and Planning
Health Benefits Strategy and Program Design

Establishing the right strategy and designing a program for your company’s health benefits plan requires a collaborative approach focused on three essential pieces of the puzzle—what your employees need, how your company wants to strategically serve them, and all the data that describes not only the current state but also reveals potential directions for a program design that gets better results while also controlling the cost. We focus on employee wellbeing to guide you into a plan designed to deliver health insurance and wellness programming that aligns with your organizational culture and strategy. Call us at 371.751.7049 to discuss how LHD can transform health benefits at your company.

A Discovery Process for Health Benefits Strategy and Program Design

Our approach to health benefits strategy and plan design for creating high-performing health benefits programs is a four-step process:

1. Learn, Understand, Plan
2. Intentional Design
3. Implement and Execute
4. Measure and Evaluate

We begin with a discovery process to assess your current employer health benefits plan through benchmarking, financial review, strategy analysis, and an inventory of programs and tools used at your company. 

Data-Driven for Better Health Benefits Plans and Outcomes

A strategic approach covering both a health insurance plan and employee wellness programs for any client must be data-driven. This is something we are passionate about at LHD. Why? Our passion is rooted in our experience of how data can and should be leveraged into a better understanding of what gets the desired results in workplace health. 

Our commitment to high-impact data analytics was sealed when we launched Vital Incite back in 2013. With the information and data it collects on a plan, LHD proactively identifies both risks and opportunities based on employee behaviors. And we share this data with every client customer every month with full transparency. This combination of being people-focused and data-driven minimizes risks in transitions and reveals gaps in existing plans. It’s a big part of how we establish high-performing plans for a wide range of US employers.

Getting Involved in Employee Health in a Meaningful Way

The hard lesson that has been learned by many employers across America is this: If the only strategy for controlling the cost of a health plan has been by cutting or reducing benefits, that strategy will quickly run its course and present the risk of reductions in employee recruitment and retention. But failing to control the cost is also not an option when health care costs keep spiraling ever higher (fully 18% of the economy in 2020). The realization many have finally arrived at is getting involved in the actual health of employees in a meaningful way. The healthier your workforce, the lower the cost of their healthcare. 

Most employers, however, simply haven’t had the kind of data and data analytics available to know anything about employee population health, let alone design a benefits plan that includes programs to address employee health. Those days are over if you work with a health benefits advisor such as LHD. We understand how data is the key that unlocks the door to lower employer healthcare costs and better benefits for employees. A few LHD statistics that prove the point:

• Health Coaching: Members engaged with an LHD health coach reduced concurrent health risk by an average of 6%.
• PMPM Spend: Clients engaged with a Health Coach experience PMPM (cost per member per month) medical spend 1% below the national trend.
• Chronic Health: Clients engaged with a Health Coach experience Diabetes and Blood Pressure improvements 5% above national trend. 

And make no mistake, employees who see their employer investing in their health to reduce illness, disease, and chronic conditions will love their job and their employer all the more. And as an employer you reap the benefit of increased productivity and performance from your workforce.

Assessing Your Current Employer Health Benefits Plan

It may sound like a pipe dream to think you can reduce health plan cost while enhancing benefits, but we’ve seen it time and time again. The specifics of how it plays out at any given workplace depend on a wide range of different factors. 

For example, perhaps an analysis of healthcare utilization data reveals a significant trend of emergency room (ER) use for care that could have been provided by a primary care physician (PCP). Care delivered via the ER is especially expensive. What could be done about this trend? There are ways to incentivize specific behavioral change through plan design. You could make visits to PCPs free while charging a premium for non-emergency visits to the ER. 

A bigger shift might be moving from a traditional fully-insured plan design to one that is self-funded. What data might reveal this as an option? If your company’s workforce is largely young, healthy, and relatively free of chronic health conditions, then everyone might be paying a lot for a traditional PPO plan that is vastly underutilized because everyone’s essentially healthy. What if those PPO dollars instead went into another type of model, such as a health savings account (HSA)? If your workforce is the right demographic, the savings can be so significant that you find opportunities to actually offer additional health benefits and wellness programming while your cost is still lower or about the same as before.

Our deep dive into the data is essential for building an understanding of your workforce and learning important insights into what’s possible for health benefits strategy and program design. The examples above illustrate how smart plan design can result in cost savings that can then be turned into an expansion of benefit offerings. This is the kind of win-win scenario we strive to achieve for every client through our data analytics.

Getting Health Care Benefits Right: LHD at Your Service

Of all the various employer benefits companies can offer, healthcare benefits remain the top priority across all employees, to the tune of 95% according to a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Retirement benefits was a surprisingly distant second at 71%. If you’re not adjusting benefit offerings at your company to fit the priorities and trends of your workforce, recruitment and retention could suffer.

Getting healthcare benefits right is increasingly a top priority for many businesses, and rightfully so. But many feel at a loss when it comes to understanding and planning health benefits strategy and program design. The good news is that your company doesn’t have to try and figure all of this out on your own. LHD has been helping companies in all industries design and implement high-performing health benefits plans for more than two decades. 

The successes we’ve achieved on behalf of our 200+ clients speak for themselves. Our overall approach is based on mutual trust, collaboration, and transparency. In fact, LHD is pursuing HITRUST certification, which is the highest level of privacy and security. We’ll be one of the first agencies in our industry to achieve this certification. When you partner with LHD, you’ll be on the frontlines of the most innovative health benefits strategy and program design. We warmly invite you to discover more by exploring our website and then calling us at 371.751.7049 to discuss your needs and how we can meet them.