Overview
This article demonstrates how you can use our Analytics → Insights tool to make informed, data-driven decisions about health insurance renewals. With the following three insights, you'll be able to see trends of how employees are utilizing your current plans and what your plans are costing your company and employees.
View Current Plan Selections
Before you start to analyze insights, it's helpful to cross-reference your current plan selections. Go to HR → Benefits. In the tab for Active Benefits, you can see all your current plans and the number of employees enrolled in each. You can also see the alpha and numeric abbreviations for each plan.
Analyzing Insights
Now, open a new browser tab and go to Analytics → Insights → Health benefits. At a glance, you can see the costs that you and your employees could expect to pay for health benefits.
Select More Insights.
In the top right, select the expanded view to show all the insights on the dashboard.
Insight 1: What are your employees’ needs and preferences?
Scroll down to the question, What are the costs associated with the health benefits offered? Select the insight Company cost of health benefits by plan & employees enrolled.
This insight shows you the cost of your company's contributions to each plan and how many employees are enrolled in each plan. This data can be used to anticipate costs for an upcoming year and pinpoint plans that are under-utilized.
As you look over this Insight, ask yourself some questions:
What plans are the most popular with my employees?
In this example, plan A4 is the most popular medical plan. You can always switch over to the Benefits tab to remind yourself what each plan is. For instance, plan A4 is Aetna Open Access Elect Choice EPO.
Why are some plans more popular than others?
Let’s compare two medical plans with the highest number of enrolled members, A4 and D3.
The Benefits page shows that these plans are both Exclusive Provider Organization plans (EPO), and the contributions to these plans are comparable.
Now, you can view the details of the plans to see if you can find some more clues.
In this example, Plan A4 doesn’t have a deductible, and plan D3 has a high deductible. This shows that these employees tend to value EPO plans, but some prefer an EPO that is a High-Deductible Health Plan, which will have lower premiums but will have 0% coinsurance on many services. Others prefer the richer plan with no deductible and higher premiums that will allow the insurer to offer copay pricing for many services.
Which plans cost our company the most money?
In the leftmost column, you have company cost of benefits, and the highest cost is coming from plan A4, which is an EPO plan with the highest number of enrolled members and a lot of richness.
Am I offering a variety of plans?
In the left column, you can see the plan codes. Back in the Benefits tab, you'll notice that two Point of Service (POS) plans, [C3 and E1], and four EPO plans are being offered. By clicking on the "View Plan" links, you'll find that POS plans provide both in-network and out-of-network coverage, while EPO plans only offer in-network coverage.
Insight 2: Which plans are popular for employees with or without dependents?
Now, let’s look at the second customized insight that will give us a lot more information about which plans are popular with employees based on the coverage they need for themselves and their dependents.
Scroll down to "How many employees are enrolled in each plan?" and click on Employee Enrollment by type and plan.
Here, we can see an insight that compares all the employee + dependent plans in one aggregate column with all the employee-only selections.
If I close this insight and return to the dashboard, I can also see various combinations of employees and employees plus their dependents distributed across the plan selections.
Looking at these insights and your survey results, think about these questions…
- Which plans were the most popular last year?
- Are employees evenly distributed across your plans? Having an even distribution can sometimes contribute to lower rate increases in future years.
- Are you offering a variety of network types?
Insight 3: How are my health insurance costs changing over time?
Now, let’s focus on costs. Scroll to the company's cost of health benefits by plan and select it.
If you want to see specific numbers, you can download a spreadsheet of the data in the top right corner to view this data in a table format.
As your company grows, you will likely be spending more on benefits, so you may want to compare this data to headcount by clicking on Compare to → Benefits Information (Category) → Enrolled Member Count (Non-International Employee).
Now, you can see a correlation between enrolled members and company contributions.
Review this insight and ask yourself some questions…
- How are my health insurance costs changing over time?
- How will changes in enrollment affect the cost of benefits this year?
- Looking at the total cost of benefits this year and last year, does my company expect to increase or decrease our budget for health insurance plans?
We encourage you to review these three insights as you set goals for renewals and decide what plans and contribution amounts to offer your employees this year.
Permissions and Access
The full capabilities of Insights are only available to Justworks customers who are on the Plus plan. If you are a customer on the Justworks Basic plan, you have full access to Data Exports and limited capabilities within Insights. If you are interested in upgrading to our Plus package to get access to the full Insights feature set, please contact us.
Admins will only be able to access the data that their current permissions allow. People Analytics requires admins to have the “View Invoices & Reporting” permission. To learn more about permissions and how to edit them, visit our Help Center article on Company Level Permissions.