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EKA Planning Services Professional Services

EKA Planning Services uses three core principles to service and manage your employee benefits plans. We provide to our client’s professional value-added services that are based on strategic planning, five-star service and cutting-edge technology.

Strategic Planning

We recommend that our clients make employee benefits management a strategic initiative. By defining objectives and developing an action plan based on meeting those objectives, we ensure an organized and comprehensive approach to fulfilling your benefits needs. Our careful strategic planning services include ongoing evaluation of all your plan’s characteristics such as access, service, and price to ensure a proper balance is achieved. Strategic planning also shields your plan from becoming obsolete as new trends and market factors emerge and can help with budgeting and long-term cost management.

Five-star Service

We pride ourselves on the level of knowledge and service we provide to our clients.
Contact: We meet with clients regularly to ensure carriers, coverage and costs are meeting expectations.
Education: We conduct employee meetings and provide custom communication materials for employees.
Advocacy: We work on your behalf to bring an unbiased perspective to all situations, with no allegiance to any specific carrier or vendor.
Personnel: We hire and maintain a professional, experienced staff and ensure that they are up to date on all the latest trends and information.
Information: We possess the information and expertise that allow us to negotiate comprehensive, competitive benefits programs and we know where to find answers to your insurance, employee benefits and human resources questions.

Technology

We use leading-edge technology to provide our customers with the latest data analysis; as well as legislative, communication, and human resources administration tools. Using powerful web-based applications, we provide our agency staff and our clients with unsurpassed efficiency and access to information.

Plan Strategy Capabilities

EKA Planning Services offers the following services to help you offer competitive and cost-effective benefit plan designs:

Actuarial Services

We employ the services of several Actuarial Firms, all of which can assist with actuarial calculations critical to your employee benefit plan (if necessary). Services include but are not limited to providing analyses and studies ranging from basic valuations to highly sophisticated long-range forecasts. By partnering with them, we go beyond standard solutions and deliver the maximum value for your benefit dollar.

Plan Design Advisor

Eliminate guesswork from your benefits renewal process. EKA Planning Services can provide tools that can help you make educated benefit plan decisions, balancing cost and value for your company and employees.
Through this process, we can help you:

Benchmark Surveys & Statistics

Our benchmarking data provides you a standard to which you can compare your benefit programs. We will make recommendations to help you enhance your plan while at the same time remaining competitive and reducing your overall plan costs.

Valuable benefit trend statistics and surveys are one of the core pieces of information that we provide to our clients to help support your benefit plan design strategy and decisions. These surveys and statistics provide benchmark data from leading consulting organizations around the country and cover the following topics:

Plan Design

We offer our clients educational pieces on plan design, so they are fully informed when considering their design options.

Data Analysis

EKA Planning Services has managed medical benefits programs for over one-thousand employer groups in an effort to keep costs below comparable levels experienced by other employers. Our aggressive management technique includes several internal medical management and preventive health initiatives.

As the healthcare industry continues to change, our firm has remained ahead of the game. With leading-edge technology, we are able to obtain meaningful information that helps us evaluate cost drivers, trends and savings opportunities associated with our clients’ benefits plans. In addition, we work to evaluate the impact of various plan management initiatives and forecast the impact of future changes.

We provide employer groups with tools that will provide consistent year-to-year data, easy-to-read reports and comparative benchmarks. This highly meaningful yet understandable information enables us to work together with your data in a continuous, interactive manner as plan management issues arise.

Our Approach to Meeting Your Needs: Decision Master Initiative Database

Years of experience and extensive research into the needs of our clients led to the development of the Decision Master Initiative Database — a medical claim decision support system that significantly impacts the way traditional health care claims information is viewed and utilized.

What is the Decision Master Initiative Database?

Decision Master Initiative Database (DMID) is an Internet-based decision support system for managing group medical plans. DMID lets us detect problems with medical utilization or plan cost, isolate the root causes of problem areas and create money-saving solutions.

What can the Decision Master Initiative Database do for our Clients?

Quality versus Quantity

The benefits manager of a Fortune 500 company was quoted in Business & Health as saying,
“Any benefits manager can relate to the problem. The attempt to control corporate health costs invariably is stymied by the lack of meaningful information. It’s not a problem of quantity, but the quality of the data that is available.”

Components of the Decision Master Initiative Database

Thanks in part to technological and operational advances, claims administrators are typically able to capture and report on volumes of claims data. Claims data can be provided in numerous ways but reports are typically cumbersome, lack a meaningful benchmarking process and are difficult to extract valuable information from without considerable additional effort and analysis. Benefits managers are challenged to derive value from a vast and complex array of reports and find it difficult to use the information to help their companies positively impact benefits costs.

Unorganized data from too many different sources makes it impossible to clearly focus on areas of high utilization and cost. DMID lets us take the opposite approach. One of the primary goals of the DMID system is to simplify the typical reporting process and extract meaning from your group’s claims experience.
Before looking at the details, DMID lets us see the big picture. For example, the DMID process allows us to see if various cost and utilization areas are abnormally high by first comparing our clients data to nationally recognized norms. After this high-level observation is made, we can then determine why the situation exists and begin formulating solutions.

With the help of Decision Master Initiative Database, you can get the quality information you need to refine your medical benefits, plan design strategies, and make smarter decisions. With information at its core, DMID provides a structured insight into your plan and drives long-term strategies that will shape your health plan design and employee communication efforts.

Health Plan Management Reports

DMID is based on a philosophy of structured information and normative analysis. The Health Plan Management Report is designed to provide our clients with information and analysis we can use to develop broad observations and cost-saving strategies. Regional and state normative measures of health plan cost and utilization are core components of the report. Benchmarks identify where plan use, or cost is higher than average and offers the platform from which productive plan design alternatives can be examined.

Each DMID Health Plan Management Report contains nearly 33 easy-to-read and comprehensive exhibits, with approximately 68-pages, full reports available to customers looking for more comprehensive analysis. Nearly every exhibit contains descriptive and engaging charts to make the data easier to understand, as well as benchmark comparisons, advice for comprehending the data and suggestions on where to look for more detail.

DMID also offers an Rx Management Report, covering topics such as paid summary, PMPM, total member cost share, retail vs. mail service, brand vs. generic utilization, high-cost claimants and more.

Ad Hoc Analysis

DMID uses state-of-the-art online analytical processing. This powerful querying engine formulates your data into robust “cubes” that allow it to be viewed in limitless variations. DMID’s Ad Hoc Analysis can answer nearly any question you have about claims experience, such as:

Not only can we answer these questions and more using Ad Hoc Analysis but can also find answers without knowing how to program or use a complex report-writer. The Ad Hoc Analysis viewing tool makes use of intuitive, drag-and-drop technology, allowing us to easily manipulate the data. Ad Hoc Analysis even allows us to create ad hoc charts and graphs for any exhibit.

EKA Planning Services uses Ad Hoc Analysis to analyze the following categories:

Plan Design Modeling

The Decision Master Initiative Database claims analysis process is designed to help our clients save benefit dollars by making plan design decisions that are based on observable claims experience. You should expect that any plan design changes you make will have a desirable financial outcome.

Our goal is to clearly present plan savings projections in a realistic format, based on your company’s actual claims experience. DMID’s Plan Design Modeling feature lets us do just that.

Once we isolate problem areas using Ad Hoc Analysis, Plan Design Modeling lets us focus on solutions. DMID’s modeling feature lets us experiment with plan design alternatives and see if plan changes can save you money. The advanced modeling capabilities even show how plan members would be affected by a particular plan change.

DMID allows us to model your plan based on a variety of plan elements, including:

With Plan Design Modeling, EKA Planning Services can examine where needs for possible plan changes are. We can determine the financial impact of a particular plan change and understand how employees will be affected by that change based on the historical data being modeled against.

Summary

We believe that the best decisions regarding our clients health plan design will be based on careful observations of trends, utilization patterns, and normative comparisons over multiple years. We are confident that our claims data analysis services will help us produce the results necessary to meet your employee medical benefits objectives and help you strategically manage costs.