Smart Enrollment Program Optimizes Benefits Strategy
CHALLENGE
The Pepsi Bottling Group is the world's largest bottler and distributor of Pepsi-Cola beverages, with 57 plants and 298 distribution centers in the U.S. Its flexible benefits plan covers approximately 32,000 U.S. employees and their dependents, and includes three PPO medical plans, 31 HMOs, and a flexible spending account.
Rather than shifting costs, The Pepsi Bottling Group wanted to reduce their total healthcare expenditure. One way to accomplish this was to arm employees with the information necessary to make informed healthcare decisions. With this in mind, the company developed a campaign to educate and engage employees during the open enrollment process--enabling them to make better helathcare decisions for themselves and their families.
SOLUTION
For the 2008 enrollment process, The Pepsi Bottling Group wanted to help employees understand their own patterns of healthcare usage and enable them to choose the smartest (and most economical) medical plan and spending accounts. Specifically, it wanted to improve spending account participation, increase usage of their online cost calculator tool, and migrate employees from the most expensive medical option to low- and mid-priced plans.
The company collaborated with the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters and three other consulting firms to design a comprehensive, targeted campaign called Smart Enrollment. The goal of the program was to engage employees and provide them with the information needed to choose the most appropriate medical plan. Smart Enrollment was promoted heavily via posters, meetings, and video.
The Pepsi Bottling Group provided each covered employee with a personalized report of their family's previous helathcare utilization, a guided questionnaire, and an online cost calculator. The personalized report was marked "sealed at Thomson Reuters" to address privacy issues and was packaged inside a pre-enrollment kit that explained how to use the information to make better decisions for 2008.
The integrated data warehouse that Thomson Reuters maintains for The Pepsi Bottling Group was employed to extract the claims detail for each family, including medical, prescription drug, and eligibility data. The Thomson Reuters account team also developed the methodology (utilizing the company's actual claims history) to sort the populations into risk categories and calculate the least expensive plan option for each category based on plan design. The actual claims data were bundled to make them most meaningful in terms of plan design, while at the same time masking sensitive information, such as mental health claims.
The company also devleoped a paper quiz to help new employees and HMO participants determine their healthcare usage. Thomson Reuters, in coordination with the consulting firms, developed a methodology to convert the risk categories into an easy-to-follow questionnaire in the Smart Enrollment Guide. The paper tools worked alone or in combination with an existing online tool.
RESULTS
The Smart Enrollment campaign resulted in almost 1,000 new enrollments to the spending account, in addition to increases in annual contributions by employees who had enrolled in previous years. Usage of the online Results Modeler doubled.
As a result, there was a two-percent migration from the most expensive medical option to the mid- and lower-priced plans. The Pepsi Bottling Group continues to provide employees with a 2008 healthcare tracker to monitor their usage.