Western State Insurance

Group Benefit Plans

Our benefit planning professionals will support your company in all aspects of plan design, financing, administration, communication and compliance. To achieve your goals, we use our proven Benefits PlanRIGHT™ process for all our clients.

1) Discover

We start by listening to you about the vision and culture of your company and gaining an in-depth understanding your strategic employee benefit plan objectives. We learn about your coverage offerings, contribution strategies and budgetary goals. We then gather information about the make-up of your workforce, enrollment demographics, and can survey your plan participants to understand how they value your benefit offerings for comparison against your strategic objectives.

2) Plan Analysis and Design

We conduct a thorough audit of your current benefit offerings to expose overlaps or gaps in coverage, or possible inconsistencies with your objectives. We critically evaluate core and supplemental coverages, the proper integration of the continuum of benefits, funding arrangements, specific contract language, vendor contracts and service commitments, benefit coverage, provider network access and savings, utilization patterns, care management programs, return-to-work programs and wellness initiatives. We’ll even benchmark your benefit plans with similarly situated employers to help evaluate their overall market competitiveness.

3) Benefits Brokerage

If after discussing our findings and recommendations you agree there are opportunities for improvement, we then can professionally present your programs to the market to obtain timely and accurate proposals for coverage. Our services include development of RFP specifications to meet your strategic objectives, distribution to markets, initial evaluation of responses and preparation of cost projections. We then provide negotiation of final rates, coverage and service commitments.

4) Implementation

We can’t emphasize enough the critical importance of effective communication and implementation of benefit changes. Employees have to understand their total benefits package in order to appreciate its value. We bring cutting edge benefits technology to both employers and employees in communicating, enrolling and maintaining benefit programs.

5) Ongoing Review and Support

After program implementation, our commitment to you and your plan participants has only just begun. We'll provide you with a pro-active service plan that ensures your programs are monitored and maintained throughout the year. We'll continue to work with you on any needed ongoing custom employee communications, provide claims advocacy and problem resolution when concerns arise, work with you and your carrier partners to ensure HIPAA secure communications and appropriate regulatory compliance, and perform detailed analysis of claims data and managed care services when available and recommend market-proven best practices to address areas of concern. Then, we'll provide you with a year-end stewardship report recapping our service plan with our performance.

6) Renewal

Around mid-year, we'll begin the planning process to renew your programs for the following year. Our analysis includes a review of funding performance, utilization patterns, assessment of any care management programs, a provider network access analysis, assessments of performance of the service providers to your benefit plans and an evaluation of current market conditions and trends. About 120 days before renewal, we combine our assessments with a detailed review of the pre-renewal rates and underwriting and determine if marketing your programs is appropriate or necessary. We'll work with you on selecting options to best meet your strategic benefit plan objectives and conduct final service negotiations and contract placement. We then begin again the implementation of the renewed benefits and deliver an effective communications campaign to ensure your employees understand the value of your benefit offerings.