Renewal Assist

We believe renewing coverage should be easy. You should be able to renew your benefits coverage with minimal effort, and better focus your time and efforts on other aspects of your business. This is why we are launching Renewal Assist.

Renewal Assist helps do the analysis involved with building a competitive benefits package under budget easier. The tool will provide you information about your group's renewal status, and important information to consider that took place in the previous benefit year, such as class changes, new work location, and employee data changes. The assist tool will help you create rollover rules for each benefits product, allow you to set replacement plan, and allow you to compare renewal package with current benefits package.

Renewal Assist can be found on the client listing page, under the action button “Renew Now”.

Form Generator

We know that managing paper forms are a hassle; you have to print them out, administer to them, remind employees to fill them out, and then file them away.  The Form Generator will help you better manage and administer your documents electronically. Form Generator allows you to load any document type, regardless of format or document type, to generate pre-filled forms using data already available on the platform. 

The form generator allows you to perform text-tagging in the form.  Text-tagging is the act of inserting a text box to an area of the form where an employee would traditionally write that information.  This time, after the text box is inserted, the information will be populated by the system and employees will already have the majority of their forms filled out. 

For example, you can load a Privacy Form that you want to share with a subset of employees. In the form itself, you can text-tag First Name, Last name, and Address on the document. This means when the employee themselves access the form, the first name, last name, and address will be pre-populated with the employee’s information. The employee can review, complete, and electronically sign the form, saving valuable time for them to focus on more significant tasks. 

The Form Generator is a powerful tool that simplifies the process of managing a litany of documents. You can easily identify employees you have shared the form with, the status of the form, and when employees complete the form. This built-in workflow makes it easy to identify hand-offs and create easy access to the documents. Once the document is complete, it will be part of the employee’s profile, meaning you will never lose the document and can always access it instantly.

The Form Generator is part of the premium Compliance suite. You can subscribe to Compliance suite from the Employer Home page.

Discovery Benefits COBRA Service

Under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986, employers and the insurance program must provide employees the ability to continue health insurance coverage after losing employment benefits. Violation to offer COBRA can result in monetary penalties.

The platform is partnering with Discovery Benefits to offer COBRA service at a special rate for hCentive clients. Discovery Benefits has simplified COBRA benefits administration for employers nationwide. The hassle-free COBRA administration stays current with the regulatory changes and makes it easy for employers and employees.

Discovery Benefits’ COBRA service is pre-integrated on the platform, making it easy for employers to purchase the COBRA administrative service, auto detect employee COBRA eligibility, and auto-sharing data with Discovery to initiate and administer COBRA. Once the COBRA service is purchased, set up on the platform is simple and instant. Once configured, the system will automatically take care of the COBRA administration for eligible employees.

 You can find Discovery COBRA service on the Employer Home page. Click on "I'm Interested" to express interest in the COBRA service, and a Discovery representative will contact you shortly with a quote.

Monthly Digest Email to Employers

We’re excited to introduce a monthly digest email sent by the system on first of every month, summarizing the month to the employers who have their benefits effective on this platform. This email will provide an overview of benefits cost, counts of active, new hire or terminated employees, and will summarize how many employees are enrolled in health coverage. In addition to this, this digest email will share the list of employees celebrating their birthdays. Below is an example of the email:

Side-by-Side Plan Comparison

Previously, broker’s were able to do a health plan comparison up to 3 plans. We have extended this to 6 now. This enables brokers to cover multi-carrier plan designs to help the employer make an effective decision. Also, all the 6 plans can now be downloaded with comparison details in an Excel report for offline review. 

Business intelligence reports

 To facilitate a broker’s business operations, we made the following enhancements to our reports:

• Employee Information Change Report - Employee Address and Date of Birth are added to this report.
• Consolidated Billing Report - New columns are added to the Billing Details tab of the report: EE pay frequency, EE premium per pay frequency per product category, and Total EE premium per pay frequency.
• EOI Report -
  • Brokers and Employers will automatically get the list of employees or their dependents for whom the EOI is still pending.
  • By default, this is a system scheduled report to give output on a weekly basis, however, this can be changed by brokers and employers.
• Arithmetical operations to be supported in the following reports:
  • Employee Master Data Report
  • Employee Information Change Report
  • Ancillary Billing Report
  • Consolidated Billing Report

Critical Illness Rates Upload 

Uploading rates for Critical illness are now easier than before. Brokers can now upload the rates by using an easy-to-fill template.

Supplemental Benefits Plan Underwriting rule

Some carriers don’t require any underwriting whereas others do. We made it simpler for the Broker to set up a rule while building the plan to say if additional coverage approval is required or not after an Employee has elected a plan. When underwriting is required and Broker receives the feedback from the carrier, it is very easier for a broker to approve/reject using back-office function already available in the product.

Benefit Proposal Editing Enhancement

Small groups often times don’t have a consistent plan year for the all of the benefit categories offered. Previously, during the renewal time frame, if the group wanted to align some or all benefits to the same plan year timeframes, it was not possible on the platform.

No, we have extended the edit proposal capabilities which enables the broker to edit the coverage end dates. Any change to the coverage end date of a benefit will also have an impact on employee’s coverage, which will be handled by the system automatically once the changes are saved in the system.

Life Status Change Workflow Enhancements

Active benefits of the group may be tied to different proposals on the platform due to them being in different plan years. Previously, when a change was required on the employee’s coverage, it was difficult to manage the life status change. We have made the following enhancement to improve the usability here:

• Brokers can initiate LSC’s from two different proposals, one after the another. One would not need not wait for completion of an LSC to initiate the other.
• When Employees are reporting their own life status change, the system will prompt the employee to make changes to the other active benefits, such that they do not miss to revising coverage for any other benefits.

Other Usability Enhancements

Previously, proposals and enrollments were accessible from different places in the online portal, which caused confusion to some Brokers. We have altered the design to consolidate where this information appears:

• Proposals and Enrollments for a particular client can be tracked from the ‘Manage Proposals and Enrollments’ section on the client’s page.
• Enrollments accessible from the top menu is removed.
• Track Enrollments and Manage Proposals tiles on the client page has been removed. 

Help Center

We have recently rolled out an improved knowledge center for brokers and employers in the event they have questions while using the portal. While we understand it is impossible to find the answer to every question or concern using the knowledge center, you now have the ability to see context-specific topics depending upon which page you are on in the application.

As always, if you need any additional guidance, our customer support is here to assist you. Just click “Leave us a message” and provide the subject and a detailed description of your request. Once submitted, one of our representatives will respond to you as soon as possible.