Engaging Employees In Their Consumer-Directed Healthcare Benefits

How to earn their trust along the way

Data and analytics can help you reach your employees with personalized messaging and custom content
 
There’s big buzz in healthcare and marketing around engagement, but what does that really mean, and what is it good for? Engagement is about getting people to care about the stuff you’re selling or the services you’re providing so that they become an active participant. And it’s important, because in the process of participating with a company, consumers learn to believe in it. This is especially critical in the workplace, where employees want to trust that their employers care about them and are committed to making sure they get the most out of their healthcare benefits.

 

The best way to engage employees in their consumer-directed health plans is to create a personalized experience that guides them along their journey to achieving their short- and long-term healthcare financial goals. I’ll explain how this should work—and how it unfortunately goes more often than not.
 
“Here’s a bank account with your money in it—figure it out,” said no one ever. However, something similar often happens with health savings accounts (HSAs). For example, employers and benefits administrators who understand the powerful long-term savings capabilities that HSAs can provide have long advised their employees to simply deposit the maximum amount into their account each month and to treat it like a retirement account. However, today’s high-deductible health plans come with deductibles that are, well, higher than many consumers are accustomed to. This presents some unique questions with regard to how to use HSA funds and means that different employees will have different needs.
 
Unlike 401(k) plans designed around the premise of “set it and forget it,” HSAs add an additional variable for consumers to consider: covering deductible expenses while saving for the long term. On an average, it will take about 4½ years for HSA accountholders to accumulate enough savings in their accounts to fund a family deductible. The strategy of treating HSA dollars like a 401(k) makes perfect sense for many people—it’s the best-tax advantaged savings vehicle out there.
 
However, when health benefits administration systems deploy generic messaging around the benefits of maxing out HSA contribution and investing contributions in stocks, mutual funds and other investment vehicles, it’s appealing to only a narrow segment of the market. In fact, approximately 20 percent of HSA assets are invested by 4 percent of HSA participants. There is certainly an opportunity to improve on these figures, but it is incumbent upon employers to provide consumers the tools and guidance to get there, and benefits administration technology plays a huge role in this.
 
If you want your employees to have success with their consumer-directed healthcare accounts, you need to make sure you’re providing solutions for all types of investors and communicating with employees in a way that’s relevant and easy to understand. I mentioned a concept earlier called healthcare financial goals. One of the key inputs to creating a personalized experience for the consumer starts with understanding what they are trying to achieve.
 
Are they looking to cover out-of-pocket health expenses? Save for retirement? Somewhere in the middle? A recent study of health plan participants showed that more than half had not considered establishing a goal for healthcare savings. With that kind of basic information in hand, employers can start the process of helping employees to establish those goals and track their progress, providing them personalized strategies to maximize their success. Depending on the investor, those might include anything from tips for making their healthcare dollars go further to strategies for using risk-based investment models to their best advantage.
 
Once you’ve provided an experience aligned with an employee’s goals, the odds of engagement are infinitely higher. However, how do you target the right message to the right employee? To do that successfully, you need to have data and analytics capabilities that segment and target your messages. User experience is also extremely important as the way consumers interact with their benefits administration evolves over time. Data can be gathered from various usability studies to help guide decisions on features and functionality going forward.
 
Benefits administrators need analytics capabilities that allow them to personalize the consumer experience based on what they know about that consumer: demographic information, the types of accounts they are (or are not) enrolled in, and account activity, to name a few examples. These are tools that traditionally have been used only in retail settings. For example, on an employee’s 55th birthday, an automated personal message can be displayed to remind the person that he or she is now eligible to make a catch-up HSA contribution. This application of analytical tools is a noninvasive and HIPAA-compliant way to let employers partner with their employees to drive the best outcomes.
 
Other metrics can provide employers and benefits advisers a deeper understanding of how their employees engage with their plans. For example, tracking employee engagement, how much employees contribute to consumer-directed health accounts, and how prepared they are to handle healthcare expenses provides a useful snapshot that can allow for more personalized advice. An employer population may have a high degree of engagement, but perhaps rates of savings are lower. Conversely, savers may score low on the engagement index if they are employing a “set it and forget it” approach. Armed with these tools, employers can better understand what the needs are guiding their employees to strategies that will make them more engaged investors and smarter spenders.
 
Personalization on this scale drives employee engagement and ultimately a more meaningful and lasting relationship between employee and employer. By truly understanding the goals your employees have set—whether that’s maximizing their HSA dollars to cover today’s healthcare expenses or investing them long term for retirement—only then can you advise them and provide them with the right tools and resources. If you’re focused on one-size-fits-all messaging that may or may not square with what your employees need or are capable of accomplishing, you’re missing an opportunity to have a meaningful dialogue with them about where they are and what they need help with—and to create a plan to guide them along the way.
 
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