Health Compass is an independent Employee Benefits Consulting, Brokerage, and Management firm.
Privately held, the company was founded to improve the financial and physical health of businesses, employees, and communities by identifying and eliminating waste within corporate health plans.
Often a top-three expense, 25% of what most companies spend on healthcare is considered waste, and the ramifications are severe:
Here’s the good news: our risk management strategies and solutions save employers $1,000 to $5,000 dollars per employee per year — while improving benefits and network options.
We work with employers across the Country who reject the dogma of the status quo and seek higher quality healthcare at a better price for employees.
Contrary to popular belief, there are infinite ways to build employer-sponsored health plans, and since we refuse to be bought by the insurance industry, our independence and expertise enable us to recommend, build, implement, and manage best in class solutions that reduce spend and improve employee satisfaction.
Although traditional options are available to our clients, many achieve greater optimization with our custom-made, high-performance, plans.
We’re a full-service independent employee benefits firm that solves our Country’s healthcare problem by building, optimizing, and managing high-performance health plans for businesses.
We hold the highest designations in the health insurance and benefits industry and understand that objective expert advice is the key recommending and building effective health plans for businesses.
Are you working with an accredited expert? How do you know? Is your plan out-performing the marketplace by $1,000 to $5,000 dollars per employee per year? Why do the clients of large firms routinely overpay by $1,000 – $5,000 dollars per employee per year?
You want to work with Certified Health Value Professionals who have the Registered Employee Benefits Consultant designation. Like a PhD in other fields, the REBC designation is the highest designation in the Benefits industry — it matters.
Three Ways to Engage:
To help accommodate the needs of mid-size and large organizations, we offer three different ways to engage:
1. Performance Based Consulting – For self-insured groups, our risk-free “bolt-on” solutions achieve savings within the first 30 days and can be implemented at any time — without fees or replacing vendors.
2. Fee Based Consulting – For fully-insured groups, we build high-performance health plans that consistently reduce costs and improve benefits — without having to replace brokers. We guarantee our client’s savings out-perform our fee 3:1.
3. Benefits Management – For groups with under 5,000 subscribers, our full-service solution manages and optimizes all aspects of your health plan and benefits. We are one of the few independent firms that guarantees results and puts compensation at risk.
FAQ’s
“What makes you more objective than our Broker?”
Unlike most of the brokerage community, we refuse to get paid commissions or year-end bonuses from health insurers. This allows us to be truly objective in the recommendations we provide. Just as importantly, it means we have access to a much larger set of solutions and the objectivity and incentive to recommend the right ones at any given time. No more spreadsheets and increases every 12 months.
“That’s interesting, but we like our Broker and according to the benchmarks they showed us, we’re doing better than most companies”.
Keep your Broker.
If you’re self-insured, we have a number of “bolt-on” solutions that immediately reduce costs and improve benefits.
If you’re fully-insured, we will build you a high-performance plan that reduces costs and long-term financial risk.
“We’ve had some increases, but don’t think our Broker is giving us 100% — can you be our Broker?”
Yes, but we are selective about who we manage benefits for as not every company is a good fit. However, for companies that are engaged, we can typically come to an agreement that benefits everyone — with us, it’s win – win, or no deal.
“If you don’t get paid by insurance companies, how much will you charge us?”
Remember, our mission is to SAVE businesses and communities money. Although our management fee is based on whatever services are needed, our proprietary risk management solutions and strategies ensure that your net costs will go down. Our revenue will always be contractually transparent to you, our valued client. Our objectivity is sacred and, therefore, we reject commission and year-end kickbacks from insurers.
Although we have our recommended process, we understand that every Client is unique, and we often need to mold our process to fit the needs of an organization.
In a perfect World, here’s what we recommend:
With unemployment at record lows, the race for talent is on. Although many Employers use benefits to attract and retain top-talent, it’s good to clarify and reaffirm program goals with stakeholders.
2. Survey Your Population: With so many benefits and shiny objects in the market, selecting which benefits to offer can be dizzying. Although Employees overwhelmingly value strong health plans above other benefits, we see value in getting your employees feedback and buy-in.
3. Identify a Goal: Once a goal is identified, then everything we do must move us closer to achieving it. For example, if your company wants to reduce their healthcare spend 10% without watering down coverage next year, we need to develop a road-map to get there. If you want to reduce spend by 20%, we’ll need a different map.
4. Develop a Multi-Year Solution: Companies that want to reduce spend and improve benefits need to think beyond their next renewal date. Since every client has their own tolerance to change, we give clients the ability to decide if they want to “crawl, walk, or run”. We show them the pro’s and con’s of moving fast or slow and let them decide their preferred course of action. Groups with a high tolerance to change often choose to aggressively change their program in order to achieve maximum savings in year one. Others prefer a more gradual approach that is less disruptive to their population. The choice is completely yours.
5. Implementation: Once a direction is chosen by clients, it’s important for us to educate employees on how to use the new plan. We do this by meeting with employees in groups or individual settings to explain how the benefits work and give employees the opportunity to ask sensitive questions in a HIPAA compliant environment. This level of consultation takes time, but significantly improves employee satisfaction and plan performance. We also create benefit guides and other instructional materials to educate employees.
6.Benefits Management: After your company has migrated to the new plan, it’s time for us to manage it. Key components include helping employees and company administrators with service issues, managing vendors to ensure they are performing well and fulfilling contractual obligations, identify opportunities to improve plan performance, monitoring claims, auditing vendors and eligibility.
7. Review and Innovate: In the third quarter of each plan year, it is especially important to review plan performance, prepare for the next phase in our multi-year strategy, and innovate as needed. From here, the cycle loops back step 5.
Like most people in the Benefits industry, Donovan’s career didn’t start there. He played drums professionally in New York for ten years and, during that time, saw how America’s health care and insurance industry were extracting economic rents from employees, impairing their standard of living.
“I lived in Manhattan after 9/11 and during the Great Recession, and you could see the devastation on every city block…people were hurting. Toward the tale-end of my music career, I fractured a bone in my kick-drum foot while opening for the band “Heart”. It was my first encounter with health insurance, and it wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t know much about the insurance business, but I knew there must be a way to make things better. Ultimately, this experience inspired me to move into the benefits industry”.
In order to learn the architecture and legacy best practices of the benefits industry, Donovan worked with a multinational insurance Carrier before moving to the brokerage side of the business. The experience was instructive:
“Too often, the incentives embedded in the architecture of the industry work against employers and their employees. This is not only unacceptable, it’s unnecessary”.
As an antidote to the status quo, Health Compass Consulting was formed.
“By sitting on the same side of the table as our clients and providing them with objective expert advice, we are able to reallocate a significant portion our client’s operating budget back to their bottom line — where it belongs”.
