Modern work environments with schedules that require over a 40 hour work week can make it challenging to plan doctor’s appointments during the workday. Sometimes even figuring out which doctor to see can take a few hours of research. A trip to the doctor’s office requires at least a half-day off of work. While employees might enjoy having a break from the office, employers may not be as excited to lose valuable hours of labor productivity from their salaried workers. Luckily, healthcare guidance helps both workers meet their healthcare needs, and employers keep their business running.
Healthcare guidance tools in addition to telemedicine deliver healthcare access to workers where they are so that getting medical help no longer has to be a huge ordeal. For white-collar employees and their employers, this is a complete game changer.
These tools are boosting workplace efficiency, increasing employee satisfaction, and are completely changing our primitive notions of the benefits experience. Here are the key reasons that office workers especially benefit from a healthcare guidance platform:
Imagine that you have a senior programmer that you pay $120,00 a year has three kids that need to be taken to a doctor a few times a year. You want their kids to receive the best care possible, but you know that each time they need to go to the doctor, they will be out of the office for half of the day. The productivity loss starts to add up over time, and that’s not counting the time it takes to manage other parts of their healthcare.
Now, picture that 60-70% of your programmer’s healthcare needs could be resolved through his iPhone using online doctors and Healthcare Concierges. Instead of leaving his desk to be in the doctor’s office physically, they can quickly ask a question regarding a health condition or procedure to an online doctor that is available anytime. Logistically, this opens up the employee’s schedule to not only miss fewer working hours but miss fewer hours spent on leisure activities at home.
Concierges can also save them time by researching facilities, doctors, making appointments and much more. In simple numbers, providing a healthcare guidance platform only costs about what a catered lunch costs once a month, as compared to the loss of half a day or more, several times a year. The logic is clear: logistics matter for white-collar workers. Healthcare guidance hugely simplifies how care is accessed, meaning employees don’t have to waste company time to stay healthy.
If anything, employees appreciate when their employer looks out for them and truly cares about them as people. One way a company can express this is through providing employee perks that workers value deeply. The leading healthcare guidance platforms, by nature, are simple, elegant, and gives workers the ultimate luxury – time.
The win-win they offer is providing a positive ROI for employers while making employees feel cared for and treated well by their company. Not only does a perk make current employees feel valued and cared for by their company, but it also plays a critical role in recruiting and retaining new talent. In a competitive job market, a quality employee benefit can be the differentiating factor that helps a company stand out against their competitors. In the war for talent, employees (especially millennials) are even willing to accept a lower salary in exchange for a robust benefits offering.
A 2015 Glassdoor survey reports that 79% of employees prefer new or additional benefits over a pay raise. Healthcare guidance platforms hit on a key concern for most white-collar workers: the affordability and accessibility of their health insurance coverage. If you can offer an app that is both a delightful user experience and a solution to difficult benefits questions, there is no question that it’ll give your firm a competitive edge in attracting the best talent. Having an advanced benefits offering will keep employees coming back for more.
When employees first open their healthcare guidance app and see that it is just as modern and sophisticated as their most-used social media apps, they will enjoy, rather than dread, navigating their health insurance and the healthcare system as a whole. This ensures high employee engagement within the platform and a high ROI.
The favorable behaviors the employees will display upon using a healthcare guidance platform, such as choosing more cost-effective physicians and replacing costly in-person doctor’s visits with online telemedicine consults, will have greater impact when these behaviors are self-driven, shared with others, and repeated by employees. All this is achieved through a benefits guidance platform that workers will be amazed to discover after years of dealing with outdated health systems and old-school online portals.
Health is a basic need and therefore supersedes work and career in a person’s list of priorities. If a worker has some unresolved health concern regularly on their minds, chances are they are unable to bring their full self to the office. The hassles of scheduling appointments, having the right documentation, and understanding what is covered by insurance can act as a significant mental drain for any employee. When a healthcare guidance platform enters the picture, it simplifies everything.
A healthcare concierge will take care of various administrative tasks such as choosing a high-quality in-network doctor, scheduling appointments and verifying insurance coverage. When workers are left to navigate the healthcare system on their own and complete all these time-sucking tasks that require sitting on the phone for minutes to hours, it can truly detract from their workplace responsibilities. Healthcare guidance will free up workers’ mental space by providing healthcare experts and leveraging AI to make the process streamlined and more efficient than ever.
Low-hassle and convenience are true assets for a white-collar worker who has enough paperwork on their hands, to begin with. Knowing that their health coverage is safely in the hands of experts and high-tech automation will minimize the distraction that workers would otherwise face in managing their medical care alone.
Also, since the process of accessing a board-certified doctor is much easier through telemedicine, a health issue that once might have kept an employee’s attention for months before their doctor’s visit can be resolved within minutes.
Countless HR experts also cite the power of great employee perks to boost morale and motivation in the workplace. Not only does a robust benefits offering like a healthcare guidance platform simplify employees’ lives and make them more productive at work, it simply provides them with a source of positive energy and happiness. As a tool that works on top of and in sync with of their healthcare insurance, healthcare guidance platforms will bring your company’s coveted benefit package to the next level.
Healthcare benefits are a perk that all employees, regardless of status or background, cherish and depend on. In fact, having better health, dental, and vision insurance consistently tops the list of the most valued employee benefits. The reason is simple: we’re all human and susceptible to health ailments, and the cost of healthcare in the US threatens to bankrupt even the most financially stable family.
Now, healthcare guidance platforms and telemedicine are defining the modern-day benefits experience as a low-hassle, convenient, and even enjoyable process. These tools are a channel for the quality and cost-effective care that employees yearn for, as well as the productive and competitive advantages that employers seek. What more of a win-win could you ask for?
