Employee Medical Questionnaires

Should I get employees to fill out health questionnaires?

Whilst Health Questionnaires are tedious and time consuming, you will find it often significantly lowers your medical premium rates. The amount of savings depends on employees current overall health. Generally Medical carriers rate based off census or claims data. There are errors with both of these quoting methods one of them more apparent than the other.

Census Quoting

  • Quotes solely based on Census Data (DOB/ZipCode/Gender)
  • Rates are often very High because of limited quoting information
  • Otherwise known as Community Rating (Groups under 50)
  • If you have somewhat healthy participants I highly recommend an alternative quoting method (If Possible)

Claim Information Quoting

  • Quotes are based off prior years of claims data
  • Unless you are self funded, your claims data does not show a lot of data points on your group
  • For example in Texas claims data otherwise known as HB2015 Data has two tiers of information of avaliable
  • Tier 1 of the HB2015 data shows the total Premium vs total amount of Claims paid out during the policy year
  • Tier 2 shows (without identifying) all claimaints that had over $15,000 in claims within the past 12 months.
  • This quoting method allows for far more competitive rates compared to census quoting. However, there is still room for high medical rates considering this is far from a complete picture of your groups overall health

Questionnaires are superior to these quoting methods because it provides a complete picture of your groups health. Leaving no room for doubt and the carriers feel more comfortable in offering more competitive rates. I have seen groups drop their rate 20-30% by using questionnaires to quote instead of claims data. This remains true for groups of all size. Although, questionnaires are generally the best quoting method there are downsides.

Downsides to Employee Health Questionnaire Quoting

  • Time Consuming
  • Needs to be done correctly according with HIPAA guidance protecting employee health information should always be a top priority
  • Employees sometimes feel upset with having to disclose their personal health information to their employer

This is where having a reliable and trusted benefit partner beomes pivotal. All of the Sanus Benefits benefit consultants are HIPAA certified and are trained in collecting questionnaires securely. The method we prefer most is using an online resource like Sanus Benefits Quoting Portal. This will ease employees feelings of discomfort with sharing information with their employer(employer does not get a copy). As well as, prevents any risk of HIPAA violations by the employer. While this is our preferred method there are numerous alternative solutions if Sanus Benefits Portal is not viable, but its free so it should be viable.. (cough, cough, wink, wink ;).