Health insurance technology is still very much behind the times. As of 2020, we’re still seeing the majority of reno health insurance companies insist on having employees complete paper enrollment forms. Anthem has a seven-page enrollment form. United includes 4 pages. These don’t include any health questions. All they’re asking for is who you are, where do you live and what other family members should be on the plan. Hometown Health can collect this in one page. Electronic signatures (adobe sign, etc…) are accepted by the majority, but not all insurance companies.
Today most people expect immediate results, especially from financial services and non-tangible goods. Most auto insurance companies allow you to print out ID cards once your payment has cleared. Even Amazon delivers in less than 3 days. To have to wait a week to receive an ID number (not a card, just the number) from a health insurance company seems a little ridiculous. Health insurance technology isn’t behind the times, it’s way back in 1995.
The Solution
As a health insurance broker, this is professionally embarrassing to me. To help combat this gap in health insurance technology and communication, we’ve decided to step up. as a brokerage, we’ve offered our own solution. In an industry that is so paper-driven, we have adopted several ways to make things easier for our clients. Some examples include:
- Digital meetings for workforces that are not centrally located or work from home
- Telephonic meetings for employees who don’t have a computer or smartphone
- Employees can sign enrollment forms entire from a smartphone or tablet
- Enrollment platforms for employees to see prices and enroll in less than 2 minutes
- Direct communication with providers, so employees aren’t caught trying to play a game of telephone with their insurance information
Technology doesn’t mean more work
We don’t just provide these tools and services, we completely customize these for our clients. Most of our clients shy away from the technology aspect of it at first. I feel like most online services are out there to make one person’s life easier at the expense of the other. Usually, the person introducing the platform is shifting the burden on to the user. We’ve recognized this problem and completely turned this around by doing all of the back end entry for our clients.
Our hope is that all of these changes make us more available. Our goal is to protect your financial well being. We can do this better by answering your questions instead of trapping you behind a computer.
