How to get your health insurance adviser to do more than simply re-broke your insurance

I am sure that you have a great relationship with your health insurance adviser, and why wouldn’t you? They’re nice people with, importantly, expense accounts.

They’ll have those nine month meetings booked in with you, presenting insurer terms and projections for the coming year, possibly recommending that you go “out to market” because “XYZ Insurer* is doing some good things with apps this year”.

They probably even write you a nice report at each renewal too with a table, based on price or some such, to help you in making a renewal decision. As for the explanation of medical inflation, is anyone really clear on what that is?

The reality is that, for most of corporate Britain, you won’t have a healthcare adviser, you’ll be using one of the many hundreds of professional health and risk insurance brokers working for employee benefit consultancies, IFA’s and the like.

As a result, most conversations centre on premiums, loss ratios, good years or bad years, high claims or increasing incidence and not on the genuine purpose of private healthcare as a benefit – keeping your employees fit, healthy and, I guess, performing at work.

I’ll let you decide if a colleague having better cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery really is a “bad claims year”.

That’s not to underestimate the importance of risk forecasting, stop loss insurance, profit shares, outpatient limits and the clever use of cash plans to offset the excess that’s just saved you 6% on your premiums!

Corporate healthcare would be a whole lot different without the efforts and valued contribution of the broker.

For most corporates, especially if you’re in HR, you probably don’t even know your broker – that will be picked up by the reward team. More often than not, structurally you’re not in control of a significant budget item, strategically you have little or no say on a valued benefit and you’re missing out on whole arena of value creation for your people.

And that should be a real problem for you.

The jump from broker to adviser isn’t far but, if you want your health insurance adviser to do more than re-broke your health insurance, realistically, you need to find a different partner.

A partner who understands that there’s a lot more to healthcare than the funding mechanism. A partner who can influence the design of healthcare pathways, who can work with hospital networks to influence better outcomes for your people and restructure your healthcare planning around an eco-system to engage your people - not as passive patients but as informed stakeholders.

If that reads true and a lot of sense here’s a simple 3 step plan that will help you drive more value and get better outcomes from your health insurance adviser today:

1) Challenge your broker

First up, challenge your broker. Ask for their views on the market, alternative funding mechanisms, tailored pathways at hospital and clinical levels. Can they give you a coherent view? If not then you could…

2) Go direct – it’ll grab their attention.

Insurance carriers have a wealth of capability with apps, wellness programmes and ideas to help you deliver more from your current spend. Today even your group risk provider can bring considerable improvements to healthcare, wellness and absence - if you’ve got the time to help them manage the integration needed of course. If that doesn’t work…

3) Go to market – you’ll be surprised.

When was the last time you tested the capability of the market? Over the last 12 months we’ve seen organisations taking their legacy relationships to market to test capabilities and, oftentimes, secure more, for less with better insights. This is a great opportunity to be creative and challenge the market to bring its latest thinking to the benefit of your services. There is a clear appetite from corporate leaders to do something different and only a handful of partners who genuinely have the vision to deliver meaningful services.

As I’ve written before, if your broker thinks that mitigating the recent Insurance Premium Tax changes is a win for you, they’re not focused on what really matters.

*Insert generic insurer name here

Alistair Dornan is head of health management at Capita Employee Benefits.

This article was provided by Capita Employee Benefits.