How data can help brokers prepare for the next disaster

Over the past 20 years, benefits data has shaped the benefits administration industry by unearthing trends that drive decision-making for employers. Brokers and benefits administration professionals use data — including diagnoses, treatments and costs — to identify trends in consumer behavior before they become widely known. In times of disasters and crisis, being able to quickly act on data insights becomes paramount. During the COVID-19 pandemic, data allowed businesses and benefits professionals to keep a finger on the pulse of changing consumer behavior, making it possible to calculate, advise and determine business and benefits package decisions in real-time.

Health and claims data are extremely powerful and, when leveraged by brokers and benefits consultants during, before, and after a crisis, can drive improvements across the entire benefits ecosystem. Robust databases and platforms with seamlessly integrated ecosystems of connected employers, brokers, health plans, and services partners create wide medical-data footprints and should be used to prepare for the next disaster on the horizon.

Identifying risks and providing solutions

Our relationship with health care technology has changed. It’s no longer enough to look at data retroactively. Instead, we now expect technology platforms to use real-time data to drive better outcomes. In a post-COVID world, employers and employees are acutely aware of personal health risks and are demanding solutions to manage these risks. To best advise their clients, brokers and benefits professionals need to leverage technology platforms that use data to simulate outcomes and can proactively take action to get to the desired outcome. For example, the United States is currently facing a rising mental health crisis that is prompting businesses to pay greater attention to the overall mental health of their employees. Benefits platforms can leverage data to help identify and flag early indicators of mental health issues and burnout, enabling brokers and employers to intervene and mitigate the impact with technology solutions like automated communications and prompts that create proactive action steps.

Benefits platforms that leverage data to better identify employee health risks and that automatically prompt immediate action steps like recommending telehealth appointments or offering crisis resources allow benefit professionals to pivot quickly to mitigate and manage risks.

Pandemics to natural disasters: Using data to create a crisis playbook

During the COVID-19 crisis, brokers and consultants saw their roles as benefits administrators and on-call experts increase. As employers and employees lean more on brokers and consultants to be their trusted advisors during a crisis, it is crucial to understand how data can be used to prepare for the next disaster.

A distinct advantage of data is its malleability; it can be sliced up by demographic, geography and specific health attributes. When accompanied with historical disaster data, data slicing becomes a crucial tool in creating disaster and crisis playbooks that will guide decisions and action steps. By being able to proactively identify emerging trends during a disaster, we can see if the changes are similar to those observed in previous disasters or are novel, which can help to quickly build disaster-mitigating healthcare solutions and offerings. Brokers and benefits professionals who invest and use technology platforms that allow for flexibility in segmenting and slicing data will be better equipped to proactively respond to a crisis and give themselves a competitive advantage with new and existing customer bases.

Related: The role AI and data will play in the 2021 benefits ecosystem

A good example of how brokers and consultants can use data to identify and mitigate client health care risks is when assessing potential natural disaster scenarios. Natural disasters are typically bucketed into categories, including earthquakes, hurricanes and tropical storms, drought, extreme temperature, extreme precipitation, wildfires, tornados and more. By looking at past geographic and demographic disaster data of their client base, brokers and benefits consultants can categorize a potential disaster type and identify likely disaster-related health impacts to those populations. A playbook of likely health care outcomes, scenarios and action steps can then be created to limit adverse consequences and provide at-the-ready offerings to deploy in the case of a disaster. It is also important for brokers and benefits professionals to compare data and enacted solutions following a disaster and be proactive in optimizing disaster plans, playbooks and solutions for the future.

Health care claims data: pinpointing early intervention opportunities

Health care claims data is one of the best resources available to the benefits ecosystem. It allows brokers and consultants to make informed decisions during disasters and protect at-risk employee populations by monitoring the care they are seeking. Brokers and consultants who use data and benefits platforms to create predictive models can help their clients develop empathy-based benefits packages, provide timely communications, drive quick action, realize cost savings and better prepare them and their clients for the next disaster — and the crisis we’re still crawling out from.

Now is the time for brokers and consultants to use data and benefits platforms to develop pandemic-centric playbooks and identify possible solutions for future COVID-19 health impacts. While the long-term effects of the pandemic are still unknown, access to baseline health and claims data for employees before and after they were infected with the virus are available. Most diseases and viruses follow a common pathway to full-blown development, creating an opportunity for brokers and consultants to use data and technological tools to gain insight into medical progression and flag early claims-related indicators like mental health care claims and deferred care. By doing this, brokers and consultants can provide solutions and benefits packages for COVID long-haulers or those experiencing mild or incapacitating COVID-19 symptoms for months or even indefinitely.

Data collected in real-time, and going back 20 years, can help brokers improve cost predictions and pinpoint early intervention opportunities before, during, and after a crisis. To be most effective, brokers and consultants need to invest in tools that provide visibility into historical and real-time data and can analyze the data to simulate outcomes to different scenarios, and drive appropriate action, quickly and automatically. Preparing for the next crisis begins and ends with the tools enabled now, and how we thoughtfully apply what we’ve learned from the past.

 John Thomas is chief data officer at Benefitfocus.