Customers
F500 Industrial Machinery Manufacturer calls on HighRoads to streamline Medicare review
HighRoads is the new way of managing HR programs and suppliers, helps corporations take on a complex administrative process—completely in-house.
Overview
In 2006, the Federal Government established the Medicare Part D program providing beneficiaries with assistance paying for prescription drugs. Unlike coverage in Medicare Parts A and B, Part D coverage is not provided within the traditional Medicare program. Instead, beneficiaries must affirmatively enroll in one of many Part D plans offered by private companies.
For a manufacturing company—with nearly 10,000 retirees worldwide— the change represented a significant burden, both administratively and in terms of the overall financial stakes.
The Challenge
For the already busy HR team, the new requirements meant researching, contacting, and analyzing the Medicare offerings of dozens of health plans across the country. To complicate matters, there would be the additional administrative burden of filtering the typically non-standardized RFP responses received from the various plans.
Additionally, determining the true cost implications of a given plan’s premium and benefits matrix was essential in making the right decisions on which plans to offer under an open enrollment scenario.
The company immediately began speaking to the large HR consultants who had helped in the past with other benefits programs in hopes of gaining a comparative analysis of available programs provided by the various plans across the country. After a few calls they were surprised to learn that none of their top-tier consultants had any type of “standard” analysis service readily available (though some were willing to undertake an extended consulting engagement to create a custom process for the company).
The HR team hesitated at the costs of such an engagement - they had decades of experience in the industry, plenty of knowledge of the ins-and-outs of the plans, and didn’t want to pay again for expertise they already possessed. In their opinion, the challenge was essentially one of quickly collecting and coordinating information in a balanced and thorough fashion.
The Solution
During the process, it occurred to them that the solution they had been using for the procurement of benefits plans for active employees [HighRoads Procurement Manager] might be used to tackle this new challenge as well.
HighRoads had always had a good relationship with them. After brainstorming with the HighRoads team, they felt they could modify the HighRoads solution to accomplish this latest supplier evaluation very efficiently—and at a significantly lower cost than a custom consulting engagement.
HighRoads created an online RFI (Request for Information) that was disseminated to 1000 insurance carriers around the country. The survey helped create an “apples-to-apples” type comparison—in a situation where this isn’t often the case.
The Results
As the information was collected, the HighRoads team reviewed the responses to create a narrower pool of potential plans to engage in the formal RFP process.
Once the RFP was ready, the solution also served as a conduit for gathering, coordinating and analyzing information and feeding that to Corporations HR team—with an additional data feed to Hewitt (their outsourced benefits administrator) in order to speed integration of the newly selected plans.
The result was a thorough and even-handed comparison of complex plan offerings accomplished in a relatively brief period of time—without the expense of an outside consulting engagement.