Millennium designed the rollover solution to save advisers
and plan sponsors time, money and personnel resources while adding employees to
a retirement plan.
The tool also helps preserve the tax-deferred status of
retirement savings for employees terminated from a plan, says Terry Dunne, Millennium’s
managing director of automatic rollovers.
The
wider Worksite provides an end-to-end solution for retirement plan sponsors and
advisers to promote participants’ financial well-being through education, advice
and account management services.
According
to Raymond Kim, director of Account Management at Corporate Synergies, the more plan
sponsors know and understand about benefits utilization, the more they can
tailor programs to suit participant needs. In an article on the Corporate Synergies website,
Kim says such insight requires data mining to identify patterns and trends to
glean information about what plan sponsors can proactively impact in the future.
Plan
sponsors can get non-participant-specific data from insurance carriers on an aggregate
basis, or request data through their benefits brokers, Kim told PLANSPONSOR. He
suggests plan sponsors examine certain metrics like utilization statistics and
average cost per variable such as gender, claimant, and dependent status within
certain key benefits such as office visits, emergency room use, outpatient
surgery, hospitalization occurrences and prescription drugs.
According
to Kim, when they get the data, plan sponsors should segment it into buckets
that are considered to be high cost to find opportunities to flex out health plan
design. For example, he says if the data indicates emergency room abuse, it
warrants increasing copays or cost share for emergency room visits, but lowering
cost share for urgent care facilities or doctor’s office visits. In addition,
the data could lead a plan sponsor to encourage online visits to address those
costs.
There
are also ways to address costs for the long term through wellness initiatives,
Kim says. If data mining reveals a chronic medical condition that is prevalent
among employees—for example, coronary artery disease—plan sponsors can start a
specific wellness initiative—a healthy hearts program. As far as plan design,
this data could be addressed by making copays for statin medications lower to
encourage employees to use their medicine.
“Performing deeper
dives into the data may reveal specific insight into your population’s
preventive care compliance, medication adherence, and most prevalent disease
states and cost differentials,” Kim says in the article. “Understanding these
data sets can sharpen the focus on how you design your group employee benefits
package and wellness programs. Data mining is the way to activate the potential
of big data,” he concludes.