Top 10 List of Why Companies Should Do Business With Centripetal

1. The Unique “No Cost” Model:  Our consulting services are provided free of charge when our clients partner with our HR outsourcing providers. Our fees are paid by the marketing dollars of our extensive vendor network.
2. Industry Knowledge: With over 30 years of collective experience in the HR outsourcing space, Centripetal Consulting Group understands the challenges mid-size employers face.
3. Endless options: Because we represent over 120 HR service providers in the marketplace including PEO, ASO, Payroll, HRIS, Benefits Brokerage, Wellness, Training/Development, Recruiting, HR Consultants and many more – there is practically no limit to your choices.  Our vendors range in size and scope ensuring that our clients aren’t pressured into considering solutions that aren’t most suited for your outsourcing strategy.
4. Save Time: It is pointless to watch numerous sales presentations that don’t fit your company’s needs. Centripetal filters through the most qualified vendors and facilitates the meetings. We prepare the vendor prior to the meeting making sure that they focus your time together on the issues most relevant to you. We provide you the analysis tools and knowledge to compare the vendor options objectively.
5. Save Money: Centripetal receives preferred pricing from all of its vendors, usually 15-20% less than market price.  We negotiate on your behalf forcing the vendors to compete for your business, saving you even more.
6. Peace of Mind: Centripetal is in the business of consulting and procurement. To procure means to obtain or get by care or the use of special means. Our reputation is our business. Your best interest is our only focus.
7. Personal Attention: Centripetal attends every vendor meeting, and consults in-person throughout the entire process. This ensures that there is no miscommunication or misunderstand on the client side or the vendor side.
8. Direct Vendor Comparison: Our vendor selection process includes analysis tools which facilitate easy decision making. This includes the services presented and the associated costs.
9. Truly Unbiased: Centripetal is compensated by the vendors regardless of which you decide is best for you. This allows our approach to be 100% unbiased.
10. All Inclusive HR Outsource Advisors: As your business evolves, we evolve with you. Centripetal will be there if it is time to look at different vendor options. We serve as an extension of HR department by staying in touch with your team to make sure the vendors in place continue to meet your needs.

Selecting the right health insurance broker is crucial to an organization’s overall strategy for managing employee benefits. This decision is even more critical when a company has decided to leave a PEO and now seeks direct representation within the health insurance carrier marketplace. Finding the right expert to represent your company is more difficult than normal because the consultant must fully understand the underwriting implications imposed by the carriers. Coming from a PEO, the employer bears no loss ratio or any claims history from the prior benefit plan.

This creates an unknown or risky scenario for the insurance underwriter. This broker or consultant should know how to negotiate around this by presenting the most favorable explanation as to why the employer has been insured through a co-employment arrangement.

Use these 10 questions as a basis for making an educated broker selection when coming out of a PEO, or anytime you think you might want to change brokers or challenge your current broker’s capabilities.

1. Does your firm provide access to virtually all insurance carrier and administration markets?
2. What value added services do you offer beyond your firm’s internal expertise? Examples would be national affiliations, ERISA Attorney, Medical Director, and Pharmacy Consultant.
3. What type of customized strategic planning services and methods for controlling healthcare costs do you offer your clients?
4. Are your services delivered through a team of specialized experts or one main contact?
5. What type of technology resources do you utilize to manage benefits administration?
6. How are you compensated, and will you offer full disclosure of commissions earned? Is this a percentage of the insurance premium or a flat fee? Is this negotiable?
7. What type of actuarial or data analysis techniques do you use to manage and predict plan costs?
8. How do you ensure that your clients are kept in compliance, and what resources are available to your clients directly? An example would be filing of the form 5500.
9. Do you provide ongoing employee support for benefit related issues/questions beyond enrollment?
10. What type of custom communication materials are made available to your clients’ employees?

These questions are a basis for matching the firm’s expertise and approach to the goals that your organization has for managing healthcare. Even if you only have 100 employees, you are large enough to demand top shelf expertise and guidance from this strategic business relationship. There are far too many brokers that do the minimum required work for their clients and get paid well for doing it. Without knowing the right questions to ask, you may be leaving valuable dollars on the table. Additionally, you and your employees may be paying higher premiums because of a poorly managed strategy.

Value added services allow a brokerage firm to differentiate from their competitors and create the opportunity for their clients to maximize their total healthcare spend.  Simply having a personal or long term “relationship” with a broker is no longer enough. Employers must view this relationship as a strategic business partner.

The fact is that the open enrollment process is evolving, especially for small to mid-size employers. It is migrating from a stand-alone, manual process to an automated, integrated environment where the latest technologies combine to make open enrollment as efficient, effective and productive as possible. Current research shows a migration from older, more obsolete methods of processing benefits applications to web-based initiatives that greatly streamline and enhance the entire process, thus creating a compelling employer ROI and more favorable employee experience.

The current state of “open enrollment” is a spectrum of 3 main approaches:

1. Companies that use a traditional paper-based enrollment process
2. Companies that use a stand-alone software application or web portal for enrollment data collection
3. Companies that use an enrollment application that integrates with other critical HR applications

Paper-based enrollment has been around since the beginning of the enrollment process itself. Many companies still trust this method, thinking it is a satisfactory way to produce and distribute all benefits information to their employees. But let’s look at what’s really involved in this process:

• Printing benefits information
• Checking information for errors
• Assembling benefits brochures
• Manually sorting benefits materials so each employee gets information applicable to their current status
• Distributing benefits materials either by hand, or by mail

This first part of the process alone usually takes 1-2 weeks.

Next, comes the challenge of the actual enrollment itself. Most HR departments find that they need to assist employees in filling out the paperwork, thus opening up the chances for HIPPA violations. Lastly, the enrollment data must be compiled and manually entered into the carriers system AND into the company’s payroll system for premium deductions to occur. Human intervention, namely data entry, is always an error-prone process. This process requires:

• Enrollment forms that are checked manually for accuracy
• HR staff chasing down employees to determine who has completed the process
• Benefits calculations by hand
• Manual entry of enrollment information into the carrier site
  Manual entry of deductions amounts into the payroll system
• Paperwork filed and stored on premise in employee files

This process can add an additional 2-3 weeks to the entire process.

The paper-based, manual method of open enrollment also incurs a soft cost that cannot be measured; employee dissatisfaction. Employees today are not happy with the level of communication they receive from traditional open enrollment. They want information on their terms. They want to be able to access everything they need to make an informed decision, including their own personal data, from one source. And they want to be able to access this information when it is convenient for them. Companies that do not deliver what employees are looking for risk falling behind in today’s competitive workplace.

Stand-alone software/web systems for enrollment are another common approach. This spectrum involves the implementation of an automated solution to process open enrollment. The case for such an approach is clearly made in the example above.

The key business drivers for eliminating a paper-based process and replacing it with an automated process are:

• Reduction in the time it takes to process open enrollment
• Elimination of the the cost of producing and storing paper materials
• Mitigating the possibility of human errors
• Increasing employee satisfaction

Typical applications enable storing and access of all benefits-related materials online, where employees and their families can review at their leisure. All enrollment forms are also completed and submitted online, with greater validation capabilities for enhanced accuracy. This results in major gains for the employees, including the ability to manage all their own enrollment programs, including FSA’s and 401(k) in one centralized location.

This type of portal allows employees to:

• Review material and make decisions at home with their families
• Get answers to questions directly online
• Compare and contrast different plans all through one easy interface
• Edit and update selections without having to contact HR

Employees are not the only ones who benefit from enrollment automation. Thanks to the customizable, rules-based validation capability present with this technology, the system will catch errors and incomplete information, prompting employees to make changes as needed.

Additionally, managers and administrators can run reports to discover who still needs to complete the process and send automated reminders, without having to chase down employees on a one-on-one basis. The workload on HR staff is greatly reduced, as employees can handle their own enrollment tasks.

Deploying such a streamlined new process can greatly reduce the time it takes to process open enrollment, and free up key staff to focus on more important tasks. Deploying an online benefits enrollment process can have a dramatic effect on an organization that is used to the slow, manual paper-based approach, cutting the process time in half from 4 down to 2 weeks.

An online enrollment process has some major advantages over paper-based enrollment—but it still falls short in several key areas.

Research has shown that employees and administrators are still dissatisfied with the level of information and analysis tools that are available with many stand-alone benefit enrollment applications. The fundamental issue is that in order to make informed healthcare decisions, employees, HR administrators, and financial buyers need access to data commonly found in HR/Benefits and workforce management systems. Access to demographic information alongside of benefit participation data allows a company to analyze trend so that no group is overpaying or under-utilizing the benefits. Data can be segmented into employee groups by: