As employers bulk up their employee benefits offering, telemedicine, wellness programs, and other voluntary benefits are common solutions they choose. While the increasing use of voluntary benefits has its advantages, they can be time consuming and cumbersome to manage.
Web portals are key tools for organizing different voluntary benefit programs. Here are some of the top challenges with voluntary benefit management and how the portal can help you solve them.
Challenge 1: Voluntary Benefits can be hard to track and manage.
Programs for telemedicine, retirement, and various aspects of wellness are entering the market every day. And as the needs of employees grow and change, you’re faced with managing a growing number of voluntary benefits vendors. This process often becomes long, tedious, and laborious.
Solution 1: Organize disparate vendors into one online portal.
Web portals give you the ability to consolidate all your employee benefit programs into a single portal that is privately branded for your company. This enables users to access all voluntary programs without having to log in separately to multiple portals. In addition, you can easily enable or disable program access based on employee needs or quickly switch to a new vendor if needed.
Challenge 2: Voluntary enrollment is often a manual process.
Additional voluntary benefits are often accompanied by additional stacks of paperwork. Voluntary enrollment often requires paper forms and manual keying in of eligibility data. This can create a lag in your ability to quickly enroll employees and engage them in the program.
Solution 2: Use your portal as the platform for selling and implementing voluntary benefits.
Through the portal, employees can view and self-enroll in the benefits pertinent to them, leaving you with an easy way to download the enrollment details for processing internally or for submission to the benefit provider. This paper-free process makes enrollment easier for employees and more efficient for you to manage.
Challenge 3: The disconnect between voluntary benefits and employee health.
While voluntary benefits are popular, sometimes their ROI is not achieved or recognized. Many employers rush to implement a voluntary benefit program but once in place, it’s hard to see how the program is impacting the bottom line. And if employers have a hard time seeing it, so do employees.
Solution 3: Make voluntary benefits meaningful.
Web portals tie together disparate benefits in a way that’s meaningful for users. Portals integrate claims data with targeted health content so employees can learn to better manage their recent diagnosis. Employers use online reporting to track claim spending trends. Because portals bridge the gaps among all employee benefits, they help all users better measure success and ROI of benefit offerings.
Voluntary benefits are becoming more popular, and managing these benefits doesn’t have to be disjointed, laborious, or unclear. By using the web portal to organize your voluntary benefits, you can create a meaningful and engaging online experience for the employee and save yourself a lot of time, effort, and inefficiency.
Want to see examples of how the HPS portal can help you accomplish this? Schedule a demo.