Why benefits advisors should prioritize digital connectivity

How can benefits advisors help drive enhanced digital connectivity across the employee benefits ecosystem? Here are three ways.

As employee benefits brokers evaluate carriers and benefits administration platforms to recommend to their clients, there’s a crucial factor that often gets overlooked: digital connectivity and data exchange capabilities. While price, functionality, and plan design are important, modern digital connectivity can save brokers and their employer clients time and money by streamlining group benefits enrollment and administration. It’s time for brokers to make digital connectivity a key factor in their evaluation process. Here’s why — and how — to do it.

Digital connectivity — the lifeline of the benefits ecosystem

While electronic data interchange (EDI) has been used for decades to electronically send enrollment information from HR and benefits administration systems to carriers, it has many shortcomings. In recent years, the industry has shifted towards application programming interfaces (APIs) for enhanced, scalable data exchange. However, only a few benefits carriers and administration platforms have adopted APIs thus far, making it critical for brokers to advocate for better digital connectivity.

Benefits carriers and administration platforms that use enhanced, API-powered data exchange provide better service to brokers, employers, and employees: faster enrollment, fewer errors, streamlined account maintenance, and more.

For instance, the traditional process of setting up EDI feeds when adding a new benefit takes 8-12 weeks due to manual file building, testing, and lots of back-and-forth between carriers, platforms, and brokers. With modern connectivity, this timeline is reduced to a few days. Brokers can make changes later in the sales cycle, effectively extending the selling season for them and allowing employers to make changes closer to open enrollment.

High-level connectivity can also mitigate the impact of inaccurate and incorrectly formatted employee enrollment data. Usually caused by human error, these inaccuracies can result in delays in employees being enrolled and create coverage issues and hours of manual billing reconciliation. With APIs, bad data can be identified and more easily corrected before causing critical problems.

Ultimately, API connectivity makes the entire benefits experience more automated — even for small groups. Information is automatically transmitted from the benefits administration platform to multiple carriers, without any manual intervention by brokers or their clients.

For brokers, the industry’s adoption of enhanced connectivity means they can recommend benefits solutions that are more connected, efficient, and user-friendly. Brokers now have a responsibility to understand the new API-based landscape, choose solutions that are fully integrated and optimized for this new way of working, and be vocal about why this matters.

Taking action for better digital connectivity industry-wide

How can benefits advisors help drive enhanced digital connectivity across the employee benefits ecosystem? Here are three ways:

Do your homework

Brokers should continually study and understand the available API options for carriers and benefits platforms. This knowledge will allow them to advocate for partners to use this technology and educate them on its impact. It’s also important for brokers to take it upon themselves to stay informed as to what connectivity technologies each carrier and technology platform offers.

Be vocal

As technology is already one of the top reasons brokers recommend a carrier to their clients, brokers can take it a step further and become an API evangelist and educator. Brokers are a powerful stakeholder for carriers and benefits platforms and should not be afraid to tell prospective partners they’ll take their business elsewhere if their connectivity capabilities fall short.  It’s time for us all to require, if not demand, modern benefits experiences because the technology exists to make them possible. 

Ask the right questions

During the proposal process, brokers should ask carriers and platform partners specific questions about their digital connectivity strategy. Here are questions that will arm brokers with essential information:

  1. Can you exchange data via APIs? If not, is API data exchange on your roadmap?
  2. What does your connectivity roadmap look like in the next 1-3 years? What functionality is on your roadmap (EOI, enrollment, case installation, etc.)?
  3. Which carriers and platforms are you connected to today? How about over the next 1-3 years? 
  4. How long does it typically take to implement a group and add a new benefit?
  5. Who are your preferred carrier/ben admin partners? How do these partnerships enhance the member and administrative experience, in terms of connectivity, added services (i.e. decision support), and operational efficiencies?

Brokers wield an enormous amount of influence across the entire employee benefits ecosystem, as employers typically source their enrollment platform through their benefits broker. With great power comes great responsibility. Let’s work together to usher in the next era of employee benefits, where digital connectivity and streamlined data exchange are the norm.

Meg Collins is the chief growth officer at Ideon.

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