Are you getting the best return on your investment in employee benefits? Unfortunately, it’s not always not easy to answer this question. You might well have too much information on some programs – and too little on others.
To help employers evaluate the cost-effectiveness of health-related benefits program, experts recommend these guidelines:
- Focus on the overall picture. It can be easy to miss the forest for the trees. For example, when measuring the impact of a return-to-work program, it’s easy to determine whether disabled employees are getting back on the job sooner. However, you also need to consider the overall impact of the program on your other health-related benefits.
- Share information among programs. Most employers manage their health benefits in separate silos – Medical insurance in one place, Disability in another, and Workers Compensation in a third. Be sure to distribute every incident of medically related absence throughout the company. The more effectively you integrate your data among all your benefits programs, the better.
- Benchmark your results against those of your peers. The easiest and most straightforward standard is how comparable companies in your industry are doing. Although this might not be a precise comparison, it should give you a fair idea of what your competitors are doing right (and wrong) with their benefits programs – offering guidance you can use to improve yours. For example, to compare your Short-Term Disability program with these of other companies, consider how the incidence and duration of disability incidents are related to underlying diseases in the workforce and the design of the plan (the elimination period, rate of wage replacement rate, maximum benefit period, and so forth).
We’d be happy to help you evaluate the cost-effectiveness of your benefits program. Just give us a call.
