Employee Decision Support Tools

Employees are often offered alternative plans that trade higher process for higher benefit levels. How is an employee to know which plan is truly the best bet for their needs and those of their dependents? Here is where a lot of very time consuming questions can emerge, and here is where decision support tools can be an ideal solution.

Decision support tools such as Benefit Comparison (a Benesyst option) allow employees to model their heath care utilization during one plan year. In Benesyst's case, the tool will then assign typical costs to the services utilized by the employee, and then run those costs through the benefit structures of each plan option, including deductibles, co-pays, coinsurance and varying benefit levels and maximums to correctly calculate the employee out-of-pocket costs. These are then added to the out-of-pocket cost share to arrive at a true net/net cost for the employee for the plan year, for each plan, for both in- and out-of-network services. The employee can then goes back and revise the modeling to examine the effect, and ultimately make the best decision for them without sharing private health information. Benesyst tools extend to dental, and vision plans as well, and can accommodate any aspect of the plan the employer would like to see included in the comparison.

This saves the employer and the employee time, while arriving at an estimate of annual costs to the employee that is much more accurate than any of us could typically come up with, using pen, paper and calculator. This is just one type of automated tool for benefit modeling in the Benesyst system