As our HR Tech team hunkers down to survive freezing sub-zero temps here in the Midwest, we sure seem to be hearing a lot of taunting chatter from our San Diego based teammate and blog collaborator, Paula. So not only do they have great weather, they also have a NFL team that’s going to the Divisional Round!?!
How is that fair?
I’m still pouting over the Wild Card weekend results, so I’m thinking we’ll just make Paula take the wheel for this week’s blog post. Since she doesn’t have to be out shoveling snow, it appears her thoughts have turned to the wild world of Benefits Administration.
Benefits Administration is truly one of the most complicated components of HR because there are so many moving parts and critical decisions made throughout the process. As with any area of high cost and massive complexity, change is going on every year. Rarely can an employer just “re-do what we did last year.” Part of our team’s job is to see the overall picture and figure out what could go wrong and just to frustrate Mr. Murphy, make sure it doesn’t. We play a dual role of trusted advisor and devil’s advocate because what can go wrong, will go wrong.
The details and logic behind every click on a Benefits Administration website are vast and complicated. Government regulations, protecting personal health information, plan design, a company’s culture are all taken into consideration when building an online enrollment tool.
If you’re in the market for Benefits Administration, summarized below are some of our favorite features we see across the systems that might be beneficial to look for. We’ll be covering these in more detail in future postings.
Functionality of the Technology (automate manual processes)
– Centralized premium reconciliation and billing processes
– Send qualified event notices to COBRA vendor
– Run dependent verifications
Interfaces
– Automate information to and from carriers
– Automate information between Ben Admin system, HR, Payroll, Time & Attendance, etc.
ACA
– ACA reporting requirements
– ACA time tracking
Website functionality
– Multilingual website
– Multilingual documents
– Single location of document storage
- EE uploaded documents
- ER documents (SPDs, Notices, etc.)
– Reporting, Reporting, Reporting
- Dashboard
- Analytics & Metadata
- Report types
- Ad Hoc
- Point In Time
This is just a short list as there are many more functions a Benefit Administration system can offer. Some of these are much harder to find than others.
If I were to offer you one piece of advice, now would be the ideal time to start a Benefits Administration vendor selection if you are looking to implement a new system. With plenty of time to select and carryout an implementation project before Open Enrollment 2014, a Healthcare.gov-style fiasco can be avoided.