CHARLESTON, SC – Just in time for the new year: Health insurance purchased online.
Motivated in part by a roughly 30 percent increase in online purchases during the recent holiday season, Benefitfocus has rolled out eDirect, a technology that allows consumers to shop for and purchase health insurance online while also enabling health insurance carriers to track the ROI of Web-based marketing campaigns.
Shawn Jenkins, the company’s president and CEO, says the concept of “consumerism” in healthcare has been treated in the past as a passing fancy, and the conversation has focused primarily on high-deductible health plans and health savings accounts.
“These products and their adoption alone are not significant enough to influence market sweeping transformation to consumerism,” he said in a press release. “What we are introducing with Benefitfocus eDirect is a complete engagement of the consumer on all levels of their healthcare decision-making.”
The technology is designed to help healthcare insurance carriers and brokers track ROI through specific marketing campaigns and manage them more effectively. In addition, prospects and pending applications can be tracked, and packages can be configured to include life and dental insurance.
For the consumer, eDirect offers plan comparison and education tools that allow shoppers to compare terms and options and receive quotes electronically within 24 hours. In addition, an automated billing component allows for first-time and recurrent payments to be made by credit card or checking account and provides monthly statements.
Using eDirect, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City increased online sales by 14 percent while reducing its advertising costs by 19 percent, according to Roger Foreman, the insurer’s chief marketing officer and executive vice president of sales. He also noted that while insurers generally capture 8 percent of their business through individual plans, those individuals account for 18 percent of BCBSKC’s business.
“The process to reach individuals from a marketing campaign and/or broker to application business and underwriting review used to be completely paper driven,” he said. “With (eDirect), we’ve not only experienced a rapid growth in the ability to reach the individual market, but a reduction in processing time from over four days to less than 24 hours.”
“The individual market is frankly the only market that will grow substantially in opportunity in the next few years,” Foreman added.
The statistics bear him out. A recent Forrester report by analyst Carl Doty indicates 10 percent of all health insurance plans are purchased by individual consumers, a trend driven in part by a decrease in the number of employer-sponsored insurance plans. That number is expected to grow as newer and better Web-based tools allow consumers to take more control of their healthcare needs.