Three ways your HRMS can help with medical benefits administration

Your HRMS can offer many options for maintaining medical benefits such as medical, dental and vision plans. Are you harnessing the potential of your HRMS to provide a seamless and valuable employee experience? Are you set up in the best way to limit HR’s administration activities in this data and rule intensive area? Here are top tips to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck in medical benefits administration.

Use eligibility rules and configuration to their maximum potential

As any benefits manager knows, medical benefits administration can be a cumbersome task due to the rules, exclusions and exceptions topped with the additional complexity of Obamacare. Your employees will be eligible for certain plans based on a variety of core HR data: hire date, company, location, union membership, etc. Your enrollment must be based on system configured rules or else you are setting your benefits administration team up for failure due to all of the manual checking.

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When your core HR data is in place along with configuration rules, your HRMS can proactively drive medical benefits administration tasks, taking the burden off of HR staff. For example, are employee dependents still covered by medical benefits from age 18-25 provided they remain in full-time education? The dependent’s education status should be renewed each year in your HRMS and then any changes that fall outside of the plan should systematically generate communication to the employee rather than relying on after the fact reporting by HR.

Provide a seamless experience via employee self-service

As benefits can be a complex area, it is a timesaving advantage to implement employee self-service so employees can view their benefits online along with links to outside plan providers and internal contact details in the event of questions.

Medical benefits administration, or allowing employees to enroll online, can be a huge time and cost savings to your admin team by removing the intense paper-based task management. As well it is a positive experience for employees who can compare plan options and costs at their convenience at home and see the impact to their future paychecks when you’re using payroll within your HRMS.

Manage optional benefits with the same dedication as required benefits

If your company is strong at managing medical benefits, is the same dedication shown to optional plans such as dependent dental or other optional buy-up plans? Sometimes these plans are seen as less important as they are not under stringent government reporting like the requirement for healthcare. However, when you have an effective framework in place for medical, it is often easy to apply a similar mindset to vision and dental to ensure consistency and standardization. By having all benefits fully managed in your HRMS you are creating the foundation for additional employee add-ons such as total reward reporting which provides transparency to your employees as to what your company provides to their well-being.