Turning challenges and opportunities into bottom-line results.

With health care costs continuing to rise, the approaching open enrollment season gives companies a great opportunity to improve the benefits administration process lower future costs, and help employees become better consumers of health care.

Here are 10 ways for your organization to get the most out of the annual benefits enrollment process:

Measure. Keep track of administration costs for this year’s enrollment event. Capture costs for licensing, third-party vendors, call center support, internal IT/IS resources, print, production and fulfillment activities.

Track. Document the use of paper, IVR and web transactions this year. To save money, eliminate IVR- and paper-based communications.

Research. Learn the reasons why employees call during the enrollment event. Then leverage self-service technologies to automate or re-organize your transaction flow and enrollment processes to reduce the number of calls.

Update. Keep beneficiary and dependent data current by capturing or revising this information during the enrollment event. Pass dependable data to your health plans for more accurate claim payments.

Automate. Automate evidence of insurance and other proof processes to shorten underwriting cycles, improve the employee experience and eliminate time-consuming calls.

Educate. Educate employees about the rising costs of health care and benefits during the enrollment event. Display employer contributions and employee costs; use information, pop-up boxes and quick polls to present information about the total cost of their benefits.

Model. Use web-based tools to help employees model their benefits options. Modeling tools let employees estimate expected expenses for health care such as doctor visits and other services.

Streamline. Eliminate paper, enrollment worksheets and confirmation statements. Use e-mail to remind employees about the open enrollment event. Eliminate confirmation statements by providing enrollment information online.

Expand. Increase the functionality of your health and welfare administration solution to include family status change events and new-hire enrollments as well as open enrollment.

Survey. Capture information from your employees and get the data you need to make other benefits-related decisions during the year. Keep the survey short, and use the results to make continued improvements in your plan designs, system navigation and employee messages.