Accenture’s recent report “Growing Pains for Private Health Insurance Exchanges” raises several strong points about the challenges of delivering on the promises of private health insurance exchanges. We couldn’t agree more that “getting the front-end right will draw in customers, and getting the back-end right will retain them.” While the front-end user experience gets the most attention from insurers and end-users alike, administration capabilities are what really set an exchange apart.
Accenture warns that lagging administrative capabilities could be the Achilles heel for some exchanges’ growth trajectories. In order for private exchanges to truly ease administrative burden on employers, the solutions need to be able to handle consolidated billing. Without this advanced billing capability, employers will be frustrated by the errors and workload increase that inefficient bill processing creates, and insurers will not realize the savings they expect.
While the provision of more choice may be great for the employee, it places a much greater burden on the employer’s human resource and finance teams that will have to support the doubling or tripling of the number of insurers paid. While the Accenture report focuses on employers and employees, there are also many insurer-side benefits of a strong billing and premium reconciliation solution, such as accurate revenue recognition and receivable management, quick and precise payment processing for both members and groups, and increased customer satisfaction.
We have heard from our customers that they want to use our private exchange as the hub for their financial management and administration capabilities. We are therefore pleased to announce our partnership with Benaissance to integrate our insurance exchange solutions. Through this partnership, the Array private exchange solution will include the Benaissance ExchangePoint platform for billing, payment collection and premium remittance processing.
By teaming up, the combined solution will give consumers the streamlined and intuitive shopping and enrollment experience they want, while offering employers and insurers the advanced group billing functionality they need. With this additional functionality, the private exchange is much more than a shopping and enrollment platform; it becomes a true end-to-end solution for employers as well as insurers..
