Streamlines the Challenging Issues Around the Collection of Health Plan Data for UBA Partners and Provides Instant Visualizations of Data to Easily Consume Survey Results
SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 13, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Unifi Software, the leader in providing a seamlessly integrated suite of self-service data tools delivered on a Data as a Service platform, today announced United Benefit Advisors® (UBA) has selected Unifi to enhance the collection and delivery of key benchmarking data for the UBA Health Plan Survey. UBA, the nation’s leading organization of independent employee benefit advisors, actively cultivates, validates and shares knowledge with employer benefit decision makers nationwide to help them evaluate health plans and strategically manage rising costs while remaining competitive. The UBA Health Plan Survey is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive benchmarking survey of health plans – larger and consequently more accurate than the next five national surveys combined.
UBA Partners consider the UBA Health Plan Survey the single most valuable prospecting tool they have in their sales arsenal, with many Partners attributing multiple deals directly to the significance of its findings. The challenge for UBA, as the benefits environment is now moving at a much faster pace, has been to create efficiencies around the collection and consumption of data to provide employers with benefits plan comparisons and trends in real time.
“The findings from the UBA Health Plan Survey are absolutely invaluable to all our Partner organizations. It’s a key competitive advantage for our Partners to be able to provide actionable data to more than 40,000 employers across the country. Prospective employees seek out attractive benefits; similarly, to retain employees, benefits must be competitive,” said Peter Weber, President of United Benefit Advisors. “The Unifi platform streamlines our process of entering, analyzing, and comparing data helping us leapfrog the competition and retain our position as the market-leading choice for employers seeking strategic cost management and smart benefit plan options.”
Unifi’s Data as a Service platform reduces the complexity of sourcing and extracting data from a variety of Partner Firms’ CRM systems and makes the Health Plan Survey data immediately available through a centralized, secure and scalable environment for self-service access. Now, with Unifi on Microsoft Azure connecting through SalesForce, GEN4 and Microsoft Dynamic CRM, data can easily be discovered, cataloged and imported into a hosted UBA Data Platform where UBA Partners can visualize and present current and trend information easily using Power BI.
UBA Partner organizations contain and manage employee benefit costs and many specialize in the area of self-funded benefit programs. As the costs of healthcare have risen substantially in the United States, more and more companies are moving to self-funding their health plans. Companies pay a massive amount of money for healthcare in the event that an employee has that need, however, only 20 percent of employees take advantage of those services. With such a small percentage of employees incurring medical costs, companies themselves are opting instead to pay the cost for healthcare services up to a predetermined stop-loss amount. It’s realized as an expense on a company’s balance sheet. Forecasting employee claims, therefore, presents its own set of fiscal challenges.
Unifi has been delivering data-driven solutions to over a dozen UBA Partner Firms for the past twelve months. Benefit Intelligence, Inc., a Partner and owner of UBA was looking for an end-to-end solution. Benefit Intelligence, Inc. embarked on a data journey to help solve the issue of forecasting employee claims for its self-insured client companies. It meant finding a way to access data from environments not readily available in the past and to make that data more expediently accessible to employers. Unifi collects claim data along with bill pay information and aggregates that data to provide a dashboard view for the head of benefits or CFO so they can see when costs are anticipated to come through. They can also begin to forecast when costs start trending up and set aside more or less each quarter for medical claims.
“Easy access to data has become essential in our industry,” said Charles Carlson, CEO of Benefit Intelligence, Inc. “Data is a differentiator for UBA firms and can be used as a strategic asset to retain clients and build our book of business. Using Unifi, advisors have far more flexibility on how they present information. The adaptive capabilities make it easy to display the data on a mobile device, tablet or a laptop to a prospect. This is really a game changer for UBA in how member firms can use data as a strategic asset.”
“Among self-insured client companies, large claims notifications have become extremely critical to predict,” said Sean Keenan, Co-Founder and Vice President of Product for Unifi Software. “For example, medical providers often send separate bills and break out services, one for medical treatment and perhaps one for pharmacy. One person can quickly exceed a forecast budget of $25,000. Unifi is able to provide a comprehensive view of each person based on the total anticipated costs and alert companies when preset expense thresholds have been met. Unifi also helps identify variances among service providers who offer identical services such as lab work, but who may charge different prices. Employers can then incentivize employees to use the less costly lab in their area.”
About Unifi Software
Unifi’s Data as a Service platform breaks down the barriers of operational data silos and democratizes information across the enterprise. At the heart of the platform is a comprehensive suite of self-service data tools to empower business users. Employing machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, governed by IT and cloud-optimized, Unifi predicts what the business user wants to visualize and then connects the resulting data natively to the BI tool for fast, accurate results.
Unifi was founded by data and enterprise infrastructure experts from Greenplum (now part of Dell Technologies), Oracle, Microsoft, and Platfora (now part of Workday). Headquartered in San Mateo, CA Unifi operates regional offices across the U.S. and a development center in Bangalore, India.
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Press Contact:
Deborah Mullan
Senior Corporate Communications Manager
Unifi Software
(925) 383-7765