The 2024 Benefits Canada Healthcare Survey highlighted the perfect storm plan sponsors are facing: trying to strike the right balance between competitive benefits and plan sustainability.
It’s something that resonates with the benefits leads of three major Canadian employers, who said during Benefits Canada’s report launch event that benefits utilization and meeting the needs of a diverse employee base are keeping them up at night.
Sarika Gundu (pictured left in panel), head of Canadian benefits and enterprise recognition at BMO Financial Group, said the bank has seen high utilization of its benefits plan. “What concerns me is the sustainability. Are we able to to consistently meet the needs of our multi-generational workforce? We’re seeing high costs and we’re seeing people expect and demand more.”
Read: Expert panel: How plan sponsors are navigating benefits costs, innovations in 2024
Both Emilie Inakazu (pictured centre), director of benefits and well-being at KPMG in Canada, and Kelly Dawson (pictured right), Shopify’s global lead of health, wellness and leaves, said mental health-related issues are top of mind.
KPMG in Canada has seen a “striking uptick” in the utilization of anxiety medication, said Inakazu. “They’re not high-cost drugs, but the volume is increasing quite a bit. I think it’s concerning and connects back to the conversation about financial wellness and . . . [how] that is starting to impact people.”
At Shopify, in the wake of a significant evolution in mental-health coverage, including much higher available coverage maximums and a plethora of new vendors, Dawson said she’s trying to determine the “sweet spot” for the company’s plan. “Is it mental-health coverage plus virtual care? Is it just really high mental-health coverage? [I’m just] navigating what is this new norm and what is the best place to land for our plan.”
Both Gundu and Inakazu said their organizations have invested in benefits enrolment and plan navigation tools and campaigns to help employees get the most from their plans.
Read: A deep dive into health-care navigation guides
Inakazu’s team built a “choose your own adventure” style tool to help employees navigate the firm’s benefits, wellness and leave resources. The tool asks the plan member questions about what they’re looking for to drive them to the right place. Depending on how the individual answers they’ll be directed to the program they need or possibly prompted to reach out to the human resources team for more complex queries.
KPMG in Canada also has videos that employees can watch to learn more about the benefits plan during enrolment period, as well as live sessions employees can attend. The organization uses life stage ‘personas’ to help employees understand what coverage is appropriate based on their life stage, dependants and medical needs, said Inakazu.
BMO put together bite-sized videos to help employees choose which of the bank’s five medical coverage options is appropriate for them based on factors like their marital status and whether they have children. It also rolled out a tool kit to help plan members understand how to coordinate their benefits with a partner and makes specialist appointments available to employees during the benefits enrolment period. “Things like this are not very high cost, but they’re very high value to our people,” said Gundu.
Read: How BMO’s navigation guides are supporting employee well-being
BMO also created a curated mental-health navigation guide that includes answers to a range of questions, such as where plan members should go when they need resources, the difference between mental-health providers and how to check in with a colleague or family member they believe might be struggling with a mental-health issue. The bank launched the guide in May during Mental Health Awareness Month and enlisted bank executives to discuss their own mental-health issues to drive interest in and awareness of the resource.
Dawson also noted that artificial intelligence has the potential to help plan sponsors build communications plans, answer employee questions and more. Her team is already exploring leveraging OpenAI’s ChatGPT in this way and is considering how the technology can be used to handle mundane back-end tasks.
KPMG in Canada is also looking at using AI to help with plan member education and awareness, said Inakazu, noting she’s hoping to leverage the anonymous claims data that carriers have through their platform to predict utilization and nudge plan members toward benefits that may help them.
Download the full 2024 Benefits Canada Healthcare Survey report here.