Unlocking Benefits Silos: How Employers Link Benefits Delivery

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Integrated Benefits Institute

Employers are moving broadly across benefits program boundaries with new approaches to managing health, absence and disability. Only two in 10 maintain isolated benefits-program silos. For the other 80%, their most common approach is to integrate some benefits programs while they coordinate others. More than one in three integrate benefits across the most challenging silos: workers’ compensation and non-occupational benefits.

This IBI survey of 624 employers also documents significant differences in the patterns of integration and coordination, depending on the benefits programs incorporated. Solely linking short- and long-term disability appears to be a unique “product purchase” delivered by a single vendor and including a strong focus on integrated claims handling. Programs that integrate workers’ compensation and non-occupational disability
are more likely to include a return-to-work component than when group health and nonoccupational disability are integrated.

Mar 1, 2006