Health insurance carriers are targeting the small group enrollment process for optimization. Most small group employer and employee enrollment processes are encumbered by hand-written forms, parcel delivery services, and four or more layers of redundancy. The current process is frequently slow, costly, and error prone. When small group enrollment is finally complete, the process has usually taken longer than expected, leaving many enrollees frustrated and harboring a poor first impression of the carrier’s service. Post-enrollment surveys indicate employee enrollees remain unfamiliar with benefit plan details and benefit service support resources, both of which might have been easy to address with a more effective new client on-boarding process.

To realize the promise an optimized enrollment process can deliver to health insurance carriers industry-wide, the broker, employer, and employee must embrace the carrier’s new enrollment workflow with enthusiasm. To achieve targets on stakeholder adoption, leading carriers will implement tools that provide value, usability, control, security, and ready access to services. Mutual benefit will drive adoption for each constituent; in turn, adoption will ensure the success of the re-engineered process.

Integration of the small-group employee enrollment process into a carrier’s health management portals provides critical advantage. If insurance carriers effectively re-engineer their enrollment process and increase adoption of personal health management portals, all constituents will be rewarded. What follows (particularly for the carrier) will be higher returns on investment, productivity increases, and improved first impressions by their insured clientele. Equally important, the result will ensure significant client loyalty.