The Benecon Group

Financial Services
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Managing Case Loads with a Custom Solution

The Benecon Group is an employee benefits and consulting company, providing actuarial, wellness, and compliance services for employers. Benecon also develops and administers health insurance cooperatives for the public sector, including counties, school districts, townships, boroughs, and other local government units. For more than a decade, Benecon Group has been a customer of Weidenhammer brands, Hammer Dev and Hammer Tech.  Over the years, Weidenhammer has provided Benecon with technology solutions geared towards improving productivity, scalability, efficiency, and customer experience. 

The Benecon Group

Challenges

As a partner in the provision and management of self-insured employer benefits, Benecon provides access to ConnectCare3 (CC3) to customer enrollees as a means of helping with managing chronic conditions, connecting enrollees with healthcare resources, and improving health literacy. However, in providing this service, Benecon had to have a system in place that enabled them to receive documents with sensitive information securely, organize that information to ensure easy access by healthcare professionals, and provide a means of secure communication between those professionals and enrollees.  

With this in mind, the Benecon team implemented an EMR that was based in their Salesforce environment. With much of the client enrollee data stored in Salesforce as Benecon’s primary CRM tool, they needed a system that was compatible with Salesforce in order to allow the flow of information. However, using an EMR to manage CC3 enrollees created some secondary issues that hampered the Benecon team’s ability to serve their clients quickly and efficiently. 

EMR systems are strong tools for managing and securing medical records, but they’re designed for healthcare institutions in many cases. As a result, the Benecon team couldn’t record how many enrollees were actually utilizing the service, which, in turn, hampered their ability to generate accurate invoices quickly and efficiently. Instead of centralizing the information, the team had to locate secondary data sources to gauge how much client enrollees were utilizing the CC3 services when generating invoices to ensure it displayed the accuracy and transparency that Benecon clients had come to expect. 

Although the Benecon team could manage their current system in providing service to their clients, they wanted to see what could be possible to streamline the process.  

Solutions

After assessing the current processes the Benecon team was relying on, the Hammer Dev team determined that a new system could be developed to streamline the case management process. 

First, the team identified that three main cases are handled by CC3: Health-focused, Chronic Disease Management (CDM), and Wellness. For these, the application was designed to provide a queue where all cases could be viewed, along with key demographic data associated with the case. This enabled Benecon staff to easily pass along key referral information without having to collect data from multiple information sources before passing it to a care provider or coach.  

When a new patient is onboarded, the CC3 app will also automatically send intake forms to new patients via email. Once those are filled out, the forms are processed overnight, and the case moves to the next phase of case management without further intervention by the Benecon team. Additionally, these case records were given the capability to have documents attached to the case files, including test results and imaging to identify where a client enrollee was in their health journey. With all file storage hosted in the Microsoft cloud, the documents could remain secure without sacrificing usability. 

Aside from tracking client enrollee medical information, the new CC3 app also included a time tracking feature that would allow case managers to track the resources being dedicated to a specific case. This enabled the Benecon team to identify slowdowns in their case management processes as well as utilization by client enrollees. Using Power BI, the CC3 app was designed to provide robust reporting including billable hours by staff and other metrics indicating utilization. 

The CC3 application further integrates into the Benecon Salesforce database, which allows all the information to be accessed from a single point, rather than multiple data sources, eliminating any concerns around the ease of adoption for the new system. 

Results

When the new CC3 application was implemented, the Benecon team didn’t need to navigate the complicated systems within their legacy EMR to manage cases. Instead, they could quickly identify where a client enrollee was in their healthcare journey, make recommendations on which steps to take next, and track the utilization of CC3 services. This means that the Benecon team could resolve cases quickly and generate transparent documentation around utilization and invoicing without sacrificing the accuracy they had maintained previously. 

Finally, with the completion of the CC3 application, Benecon sought other ways to utilize Hammer Dev’s expertise to ensure their team were focused more on serving their clients in new and innovative ways than on the management of the status quo.  

 

ConnectCare3, a health and wellness service provider for employees and their dependents covered by group benefit plans, needed a solution to better manage our client conversations. Weidenhammer provided a system that surpassed our expectations for client relationship management issues, time tracking, and related medical condition insights.

Bruce Walters, Senior Director of Information Technology