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Post Open Enrollment Carrier Communication is Crucial for Employers and Employees

By Christie Wright | Published December 14, 2023 | No Comments

Quality and timeliness of file data transmission to carriers can significantly reduce your accounting work when reconciling your carrier invoices.

As all benefits and payroll administrators know, employees request changes to their benefit needs and insurance enrollments throughout the year, not just during Open Enrollment. Open enrollment is also a crucial time for plan updates, carrier changes, rate changes, coverage levels, and various enrollment deadline activities that are occurring. How are you distributing these changes to your benefit carriers today? Many HR teams are still distributing these changes, by manually logging into each carrier’s website and entering any changes to employee records. Changes include address changes, life events, and enrollment elections. Entering these changes manually can take untold hours for your HR team each month.

When managing benefits data, having one system to access everything you need, makes a world of difference. Not only is learning how to navigate multiple platforms a job in and of itself, but multiple systems may cause confusion, and disorganization, and lead to costly errors when it comes to managing your entire benefits processes. Transferring bad data to carriers is not only costly to companies, but can be very frustrating to employees when they do not have insurance cards or proper proof of coverage on file with the insurance provider. Keeping carriers up to date with the most current information about your employees not only keeps employees more satisfied and happier with their benefit offerings and administration, but it can also significantly reduce your accounting work when reconciling your carrier invoices.

Insurance carrier connectivity is an increasingly crucial service that improves the entire benefits process. The biggest advantage is speed and accuracy with Application Programming Interface (API) or Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) integrations with insurance carriers. These integrations automate the data transfers from your benefits administration software directly to each carrier by way of secure electronic files.

Managing insurance carrier communications for employee benefits isn’t always simple for companies or brokers. Brokers can provide value to their clients by helping them find a technology system that meets their needs. The advantages of benefits technology fall into two categories: improving the experience for HR/benefits staff and improving the experience for employees. Companies like BenefitWerks save employers time and money by automating benefits enrollment via our benefits administration platform and weekly carrier feed processes, giving HR teams back their much-valued time. Benefitwerks can send and accept files of all secure formats and is compatible with most carriers and payroll companies with no IT investment on your part.

BenefitWerks is also partnered with LIMRA Data Exchange (LDEx) Standards® advisory committee to help pioneer the standardization of the post-enrollment data exchanged between insurance carriers and benefits administration technology companies for employee workplace benefits, which aims to reduce errors, drive consistency, and streamline the process.