Your Healthcare Analytics Tools Must Include These Key Features

Many benefits leaders understand the importance of their healthcare data in making decisions and meeting the needs of their population. However, it’s difficult to decide what key features and advantages they should look for in a data analytics solution. We recently wrote about key advantages a benefits data solution should offer to employers and their advisors. Today, we’ll be looking at two more key features and how they can make all the difference for self-insured employers. 

Key Benefits Analytics Feature: Ease of Use 

Benefits leaders have a diverse, ever-growing set of priorities that draw their focus. On any given day, they need to balance a number of tasks, just one of which is understanding their benefits data. While many rely on brokers and consultants to offer analytics support and insights, this isn’t the case for everyone. It’s especially difficult for mid-sized organizations to get dedicated analytics help. 

What does this mean for employers? Benefits analytics solutions MUST be easy to use. Analytics has to be accessible to anyone, not just data scientists or seasoned consultants. Anyone on an employee benefits team should be able to log in, navigate the platform, ask questions, and understand the results. 

Now, if you’ve ever used a traditional data warehouse, you might have struggled with the user interface. Many are built for use by data experts, not casual users, and it’s not easy to navigate through the software. Artemis Health was built precisely to fix this problem. When we set out to create our benefits data analytics platform, we wanted to mimic many of the easy ways benefits professionals already interact with technology. Here are a few examples: 

• Our platform is comprised of a series of “apps,” like Explore, Stories, Cohorts, and more, which are familiar to anyone with a smartphone.
• The search bar makes it easy to find the right metrics and breakdowns and suggests popular options.
• The Visualize app lets users pick and choose from appropriate graphs and charts, right in the platform. 
• The platform has a “chat” icon in the bottom right corner that allows users to connect with the Artemis team if they have questions—they get responses in 90 seconds or less.
• The date selector enables a quick drag-and-drop to change the analysis period. 

These familiar, easy interactions ensure that anyone can use Artemis and get answers at their fingertips. 

Key Benefits Analytics Feature: Actionable Insights 

All the beautiful charts and helpful graphs in the world are no good if they don’t lead to change. It’s not easy to take action based on your benefits data, and there are few good reasons we often hear from employers. 

• “I don’t want to disrupt my employees’ access to care.” 
• “I can’t spend more short-term if I don’t know it will lead to savings.” 
• “I have too much on my plate to implement a new solution.” 
  

We get it, change is hard. It takes time, effort, and expertise. That’s why a benefits analytics solution should include a number of ways to make data actionable. 

Learn more ways to take action with your benefits data here.

First, it should enable you to see and analyze your data with a holistic view. That means ALL your data in one place, including medical, Rx, wellness, compensation, HRA survey responses, vendor programs, 401k, dental, vision, and much more. The more data you can compare and analyze in one complete picture, the better chance you have of understanding the impact of your actions. 

Secondly, your data solution should come with enhancements, data models, and tools to help you feel confident in your actions. Here’s an example. 

Let’s say your healthcare spending on mental health went up 8% last year, but you implemented a new mental wellness program that should have kept these costs from rising. Do you know why it didn’t work? Are you able to measure the impact of your actions? A great data partner will be able to answer these questions. 

Artemis offers a number of ways to track prevalence, zero in on at-risk populations, and target new programs at the members who need them most. This is how using benefits analytics can help you take actions that will have the biggest impact. 

The Artemis Platform also offers a number of data enhancements that help employers and their advisors make sound decisions with their data. A few of these include: 

• Actionable Overspending: a proprietary data model that calculates wasted spending to help increase the efficiency of your benefits programs.
• Benchmarks: let users compare to a larger population, sub-companies, or the Artemis book of business
• Episode groupers: help track members as they complete a cycle of care
• Risk Scoring: measures overall population health and assists with strategic and budget planning 
  

We believe a great benefits analytics solution should help benefits leaders take action with their data. 

Want to learn more about Artemis’ benefits analytics solution? Watch our 2-minute demo video now.

‍