Flimp Communications Unveils Benefits Plan "Value Score" Tools to Help Employees Reduce Annual Medical Costs

    BOSTON, MA, August 09, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Flimp Communications, a leader in digital HR and employee benefits communications, announced today the availability of PLANselect benefits plan value score, an easy-to-use, yet sophisticated, algorithm that helps employees quickly determine which employer benefit plan offerings are best for their individual needs. PLANselect helps employees choose the health plan option that will likely result in the lowest premium and out-of-pocket costs for them and their family. The value-score tool also enables employers to overcome the challenge of getting employees to sign up for high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) with health savings accounts (HSAs) because employees have access to objective data that helps them understand the value and cost-saving opportunities with HDHPs.

PLANselect was developed by a physician-led team of health insurance experts. And what they've done is to take a complicated, daunting task and make it comprehensible and effortless. To try the PLANselect decision tool and watch the overview video, visit the demo site here.

PLANselect is an affordable, web-based, benefits decision-support tool that helps employees and their families quickly figure out which employer-sponsored health plan option is best for their needs. The product takes only two days to implement once benefits plan details are provided by the employer or broker. There are four simple multiple-choice questions to answer. An algorithm called the percentile-of-use method is employed instead of the calculator model, which is utilized by most of the private market health plans. The main advantages of percentile-of-use algorithms are lower costs, faster implementation and far less time and information required from employees to get results.

With the percentile-of-use-algorithm method, anticipated employee medical costs, from lab services to prescriptions and surgeries, as well as unpredictable ancillary costs, are mapped against the Blue Health Intelligence database of 165 million claimants. Zip codes are used to make regional adjustments to medical costs. No personal information is necessary and all employee data is de-identified. The PLANselect analysis takes only three to four minutes to complete, and can be repeated using different medical scenarios. Upon completion, employees get a comparative value score of the available health plans, as well as a detailed breakdown of total employee costs and other plan features. PLANselect is mobile friendly, easy to navigate and compatible with most online benefits enrollment platforms. This is also the type of decision-support algorithm used by Healthcare.gov.

For employers, PLANselect helps reduce benefits expenses and lower employee medical costs by:
- Helping employees fully assess the value of HDHPs with HSA features, resulting in significantly more election of these plans and lower employer medical claims and self-insurance costs
- Enabling employees to make better financial choices when selecting their medical benefits plan, lowering employee premium contributions and out-of-pocket costs for healthcare coverage
- Reducing the need for HR benefits personnel and employees to hold meetings and presentations

"Selecting the right healthcare plan will lower medical costs. With higher deductibles, rising premiums and ever-changing medical plan options, employees want access to simple, unbiased analytical tools that can help them make better choices when it comes to selecting the optimal benefits plan for their circumstances," said Wayne Wall, CEO of Flimp Communications. "And the entire process takes only three to four minutes to complete, compared to 30-40 minutes for popular video-avatar-style products."

About Flimp Media and Flimp Communications
Flimp Media, Inc., is a video and multimedia communications company with offices in Boston, MA, Denver, CO, and Manchester, UK. Flimp Communications, a division of Flimp Media, provides employee benefits videos and communication solutions to employers, benefits brokers, insurance carriers and healthcare providers. Our customers include many Fortune 500 companies, SMBs, technology startups, healthcare and financial services companies, universities and nonprofits. Our award-winning FLIMP content-communications platform enables users to create, distribute and track interactive video and branded multimedia content without any programming or IT resources for corporate, internal and marketing communications. For more information, please visit flimp.net and flimpcommunications.net.

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