YOUR GUIDE TO HELPING
EMPLOYEES MAKE BETTER
HEALTH DECISIONS
An ebook produced by
MARKETING SOLUTIONS
Why Employees Struggle To Make Better
Use Of Their Benefits
The results were extraordinary as
employee engagement quickly
soared to
87%
Employers seeking to help their employees make better and more efficient use of their benefits plans could learn
a lot from Steel Dynamics.
One of the largest steel producers in the U.S., with annual sales of $8.8 billion, Steel Dynamics has over 7,700
employees at more than 100 manufacturing facilities. Due to a highly competitive market, the company has faced
significant cost pressures—not the least of which has been the soaring cost of employee healthcare benefits. In
2014, healthcare spending stood at $85 million annually and was increasing 10% year over year.
Yet even with the introduction of a consumer-directed health plan (CDHP) and a health savings account (HSA), it
was still difficult to get employees to make better use of their benefits, which the steel maker viewed as pivotal to
controlling its costs.
Company Size:
Approx. 7,700 employees
Searching for a solution, Steel Dynamics determined that it had to accomplish three things:
o Simplify the way its employees accessed their health benefits
Industry:
o Personalize the benefit programs that were offered to employees
Steel production
o And get employees to behave like educated consumers by giving them the information they
need and then rewarding them for making healthcare choices that provide the greatest value.
Healthcare Costs:
$85 million per annum
Key Pain Point:
Soaring costs of healthcare
After reviewing the market for solutions that could help achieve these three goals, the manufacturer chose
Castlight Health’s health benefits platform. In 2014, it began a phased roll out of Castlight to help its employees
better understand their healthcare choices and make more informed decisions. The results were extraordinary
as employee engagement quickly soared to 87%.
benefits; increasing at a rate of
10% per annum
The Steel Dynamics story – What happens when benefits are done right click here >
Page 2 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
“We had a confusing collection of contact lists and brochures for more than a dozen benefit vendors,” acknowledges Eric Record, Steel
Dynamics’ benefits manager. “We knew we needed a strategic partner that could help us transform the employee user experience.”
Castlight gave the steel maker a way to provide its employees with a single place to go to access and understand their benefits.
“It’s simple and our folks can now easily navigate their healthcare benefits,” Record reports. “It takes less than 15 seconds to register,
and users can access [the site] via the web, mobile or phone.” Concerning Castlight, “The platform really checked all the boxes for us,”
he says.
To achieve these breakthroughs, Steel Dynamics had to overcome three major barriers. These may sound familiar, since so many
employers struggle with the same issues:
LACK OF INTEGRATION
Very simply, most employees don’t
understand their benefit programs and
don’t know where to go to access or find
out more about them.
When you consider that a typical large
employer offers health benefits from
more than a dozen different sources
spanning health plans, wellness vendors,
telemedicine, second-opinion programs,
advocacy programs and more, it becomes
clear why employees feel overwhelmed
and getting them to actively engage with
their benefits has been such a big
challenge.
LACK OF TIMELY ENGAGEMENT
Even when an employer’s benefits
offering is well integrated and clearly
presented, only a small minority of
employees are actually aware of their
health benefits and even fewer know
how to access them at their time of need.
Since employees won’t remember mass
communications when they need a
program, benefit leaders need a way to
personalize their outreach so that they
can provide each employee with the right
information about the right services at
the right time.
Let’s take a closer look at how employers can overcome these limitations and
effectively engage their employees to help them make better healthcare choices.
Page 3 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
LACK OF VISIBILITY
Unfortunately, according to a Castlight
client survey, over 90% of benefits
leaders say they don’t have enough data
to know how their benefits programs are
performing, let alone to communicate
with each employee in a personal and
timely way.
To better understand their workforce’s
needs, benefit leaders need real-time
insights and visibility into how
employees are actually making use of
their benefits programs and services.
This is the only way to continuously
evaluate, improve and drive the use of
these programs.
An integrated health
benefits platform in action
Sophie is a busy production assistant
in her early 30’s. Fit and healthy, she
never paid too much attention to the
benefits package offered by her
employer, a large media and
communications firm with offices on both coasts.
But when her five year-old daughter developed a
high fever over the weekend, Sophie accessed her
health benefits platform, hoping to find a qualified
doctor on call and avoid the local emergency room.
Using the platform’s search function, she quickly
located a nearby urgent care clinic with weekend
hours and a pharmacy in the same neighborhood.
Sophie also discovered that her employer offers
a telehealth service with pediatricians on call 24
hours, seven days a week. This was even more
affordable than the urgent care clinic and meant she
didn’t have to leave home with her ailing daughter.
So now she had two options—the convenient and
economical telehealth service, and the nearby clinic
as a backup.
Employee engagement requires
a single end-to-end solution
To stay a step ahead of their workforce, employers need an integrated,
end-to-end solution that provides three critical things.
First and foremost, employers need to provide employees with a single location from
which they can access and learn about all of their health benefits. This site should be
simple and easy to navigate with a high degree of personalization that guides
employees toward those programs that are best suited to their needs.
Additional important features should include:
o Data sharing with carriers and partners along with single sign-on (SSO)
capabilities.
o Universal search capabilities that allow employees to quickly find care
options and benefit programs by name or health concern.
o Decision support aids for choosing among medical, drug prescription, dental and
behavioral health programs. These should include educational materials on the most
appropriate types of care for specific conditions, as well as tools that allow
employees to compare costs and care quality, so they can select the best provider
for their needs.
o Tools to help employees track and manage their medical, dental, and
prescription drug spending.
o Communications that are personalized for each employee.
Page 4 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
How can targeted, timely
communications help your
employees?
Take Jim, a forklift operator at a giant
packaged goods warehouse. He recently saw
an orthopedic surgeon and filled a
painkiller prescription. The next day he
receives a message from his employer’s
health benefits platform that alerts him to a second opinion
program that is part of his benefits package. He makes an
appointment to visit a specialist who offers treatment
alternatives to surgery.
Then there’s Emily, who works a checkout
counter at a retail superstore. She is also
having back pain and searches her
company’s health benefits platform for
chiropractors and physical therapists.
Later that day, she receives a personalized email with back
stretching exercises and other suggestions from her
employer’s wellness vendor. She hasn’t even visited a
health practitioner yet, and she’s already taking actions to
relieve her discomfort.
Page 5 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
Second and crucial for success, benefit leaders need to engage in targeted, timely
outreach that proactively presents employees with the right benefits or programs at
the right time.
This type of highly personalized, just-in-time communications can be generated by
applying predictive analytics to a comprehensive set of data that includes claims,
search, demographic and social information. A health benefits platform that provides
these functions makes it possible to guide employees by sending them the information
they are looking for at their moment of need.
Content generated for employees should reflect consumer values and take into
account the importance of elements like headlines and subject lines, which can
determine whether a push notification or email is opened and read or not. For instance,
Castlight found that mentioning low cost labs in the subject line of an email that
targeted diabetics increased the open rate by 20%. Messaging should be tested against
a broad audience to gauge effectiveness and potential sensitivities to certain words
and phrases.
Given the multiple devices that employees use to communicate and get online these
days, and given the expectations that have been set by the consumer shopping
experiences offered by companies like Apple and Amazon, a health benefits platform
must also support multi-channel outreach, including text, mobile push and email.
Benefit program visibility:
The view from the trenches
Until recently, Kris was using last
year’s claims experience to design
next year’s benefits. And if she was
lucky, she relied on quarterly reports
to understand what her employees
were using.
Now Kris’ health benefits platform allows her to see
in real-time what employees are searching for, and
how well they are engaged with current programs.
She’s able to view trends in the overall population
and refine that information based on location, age,
gender, health plan, and more – to let her
understand and address opportunities within
specific groups, all while keeping employeespecific information entirely confidential.
Third and to bring it all together, benefit leaders need ongoing, real-time visibility and
insights into the behavior of their employee population and how they are making use
of the programs and services available to them. This is the only way to continuously
evaluate, improve and drive the use of these programs to significantly improve
engagement levels.
Employee engagement is a tough nut to crack and not everything that an HR
department tries will work. But how are they to know unless their benefits platform
provides activity reporting on a daily basis, so the benefit administrators can see
what’s working and what isn’t?
Benefit leaders need to be able to benchmark participation and satisfaction levels
across all of their programs. They should also be able to cut this data by medical
condition, job type and various demographics such as employee age and gender to
ensure that they are engaging the most critical sub-groups of employees.
For real-world examples of what an integrated health benefits platform
can mean for employers and employees, click on the below links:
Aggreko case study click here >
Kristen and Darrek Voyles' story click here >
Page 6 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
2016
WHAT
HAPPENS
IN AN
INTERNET
MINUTE?
Targeted and timely outreach is
necessary to breakthrough. Look
what happens in an internet minute.
Page 7 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
What to look for in a health benefits platform
This checklist provides a quick overview of the core features benefits leaders need to foster better employee healthcare
choices and take benefits engagement to a whole new level.
A simple, integrated solution
Targeted, timely outreach
Real-time insights
A single location from which
employees can access and learn
about all of their health benefits
that’s simple to use and easy to
navigate
Support for personalized,
targeted and just-in-time
communications
Real-time reports on the
employee population’s behavior
and the use it is making of its
benefit programs and services
Personalized promotion of programs supported by data sharing
and SSO
Predictive analytics based on
claims, search, demographic and
social data
Daily activity reporting based on
demographic and activity data
(i.e. registration, return rate, and
search)
Spend management tools that
track across medical, dental and
prescription drug benefit
categories
Consumer approach to content
development with sensitivity and
optimization process
Benefit and program utilization
and satisfaction benchmarking
Decision support aids, including
program cost and quality comparisons for medical, dental,
vision, prescription drug and
behavioral health B
Multi-channel outreach including
text, mobile push, email, phone,
and from within a web
application
Engagement tracking by
employee demographics, job
type and medical condition
Universal search to help locate
programs and providers by name,
health need or care option
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The Castlight Solution
Castlight Health is devoted to empowering people to make the best
choices for their health. It has spent years employing the industry’s best
engineers, data scientists, clinicians and product developers to develop
a truly integrated health benefits platform that is simple to use.
Castlight’s health benefits platform helps employees make the best
possible use of their health benefits by providing them with timely,
relevant information and guidance that is immediately accessible and
personalized for their needs.
At the same time, the Castlight platform provides benefit leaders with
the analytical and communications tools they need to optimize their
benefit offerings and drive the highest possible levels of
employee engagement.
Personalized homepage for an employee
Page 9 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
It takes an employee less than 15 seconds to register and log in
to the Castlight platform because all the necessary registration,
demographic and plan information has already been configured by
Castlight on behalf of the employer. Once they’re logged in,
employees can access a central location to make health decisions,
including searching for a physician, considering whether to have a
procedure, looking for dental care, finding a pharmacy for their
prescription drugs, or learning about and connecting with
technology-enabled behavioral health benefits. With Castlight,
employees are able to connect with all of the benefits that their
employer provides without having to navigate a maze of apps
or websites.
The search discovery experience is deeply personalized based on
what the employee is searching for, what programs are available to
them, their location, and more. So, for example, if an employee enters
a search for ‘sore throat,’ they might be presented with promoted care
options for their employer’s telehealth program, onsite clinic, and the
in-network providers, including urgent care clinics, closest to them.
Further, they will see clinical educational content about the condition
and what care they might receive.
How Castlight presents the results from an employee
Page 10 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
The employee also is prompted to proactively prepare for future
health needs, since many health decisions are made at the time of
need. Specifically, employees are able to set-up up a Care Center,
which automatically suggests providers the employee has seen
previously, encourages and enables the employee to select and find
important care providers like Primary Care Physicians or Urgent Care
if they do not have one.
Further, the Care Center also serves as a single location that brings
together all of an employee’s health benefits so that an employee can
directly connect with a benefit or program.
Click-thru-rates on promoted
programs are as high as
Personalized promotions
increase telehealth program
utilization by more than
20%
100%
Care Center allows employees to proactively
prepare for future health
Page 11 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
Castlight also promotes cost consciousness and healthcare
consumerism by making it simple for employees to keep track of their
healthcare spend. Members can use the site to easily view summaries
of what they’ve spent on practitioner visits, prescriptions, imaging and
other types of testing and treatment. They can also access an electronic
version of their insurance card from the web site or mobile application,
so they are always able to provide proof of coverage.
The Castlight mobile app
makes it easy for
employees to find care and
make use of their benefits
When visiting a provider’s
profile using Castlight’s mobile
app, more than
1 in 6
click to call for an appointment
Employees have a single location
to connect with all of their
health benefits
Page 12 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
To drive better health decisions, though, it’s important that employees
receive personalized recommendations to help them choose the option best suited
to their immediate need at the time they have the need.
Castlight powers this proactive outreach to employees with sophisticated
predictive analytics, which use medical and pharmacy claims, demographic and
employee behavioral data to identify the specific needs of employees.
Then, Castlight is able to encourage employees make better healthcare
decisions by connecting the right group of employees with the right
program at the right time.
For example, employees suffering from back pain can be segmented into three
different groups: those who are experiencing pain for the first time, those with
chronic pain and those at risk of surgery. Specific, targeted outreach about physical
therapy and wellness programs can then be sent to those employees newly
experiencing back pain, while employees considering surgery can be encouraged
to seek a second opinion or connect with a clinical specialist.
How Castlight segments employees
considering health decisions
Page 13 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
The outreach to each employee, which happens via push notifications, email, and
within the mobile and web apps, is based on principles of consumer marketing.
Through outreach optimized for the specific employee’s condition, age, gender, and
socio-economic status, Castlight greatly increases the relevance and impact of the
communications, making it far more likely that an employee will opt for a benefits
program that is well suited to their condition and a cost-effective use of their benefit
dollars.
Example of Castlight’s consumer-oriented outreach
Each piece of potential outreach is tested by Castlight with real users who are
experiencing a particular condition to ensure that the content is effective and
sensitive to privacy and other concerns.
When the employee receives that real-time outreach, Castlight brings them into a
guided experience that offers the most appropriate set of options and content for
them. For example, the member who experiences new back pain would answer a set
of two questions about their pain and be introduced to targeted content and options
for physical therapy.
Benefit integration and
personalization increases
engagement rates up to
57%
of the targeted employee
population.
Example of targeted content for a member
experiencing new back pain
Page 14 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
HR and Benefits Leaders get real-time insights into how employees are making
use of their benefits programs through Castlight.
In real-time, the benefit leader is able to see utilization of Castlight by their
employees, including log-ins and what employees are searching for. Further, the
benefit leader is able to filter and sort by location, geography, or plan option. All
information accessible by the benefits leader is aggregated so the benefits leader
is not able to discern personal information about employees.
Further, by monitoring benefit usage continuously throughout the year, HR
professionals can evaluate, improve and drive the use of these programs, adjusting
their strategies based on complete, real-time data. Such monitoring also allows them
to promote their programs to increase engagement levels and drive more efficient
healthcare spend and a potential cost savings for their employer.
Castlight enables HR professionals to continuously track
benefits program utilization in real time
Page 15 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
These are all the reasons that Steel Dynamics chose Castlight to help it turn
its employees into engaged healthcare consumers. Yet as big and bold as that
initiative was, says benefits manager Record, in the end it boiled down to a
few key things:
o Castlight made it simple for employees by giving them one place where
they could easily access and learn about all of their benefits.
o Castlight helped the steel maker educate its employees by reaching out
to them with personalized, timely and actionable information.
o Castlight gave employees the tools they needed to be smart healthcare
consumers and allowed the steel maker to reward them when they made
good choices.
o And Castlight allowed Steel Dynamics’ benefits leaders to gauge their
programs' impact and make needed improvements as they moved forward.
The Castlight advantage is that it lets an employer do all of these things with
a single, proven, end-to-end solution.
Page 16 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions
About Castlight
Our mission is to empower people to make the best choices for their health and to help
companies make the most of their health benefits. We offer a health benefits platform that
engages employees to make better healthcare decisions and can guide them to the right
program, care, and provider. The platform also enables benefit leaders to communicate and
measure their programs while driving employee engagement with targeted, relevant
communications. Castlight has partnered with enterprise customers, spanning millions of lives,
to improve healthcare outcomes, lower costs, and increase benefits satisfaction.
We’ve worked with more than 200 customers.
Page 17 | Helping Employees Make Better Health Decisions