“Only one person broke down in tears during a client meeting today,” my friend said, sipping his beer. “It was a good week.”
He leads the client implementation team for a major national benefits provider, and anyone who works in employer health and benefits knows his pain. Call it the Q4 Crunch. Getting ready for every new client’s benefits program to take effect on January 1 means long hours, frantic calls, and many canceled holiday vacations. Client implementation teams start working in late summer to prepare for 1/1 implementations, building project plans, to-do lists, and configuration playbooks to review with their new clients. And of course, they start talking about data.
How the Q4 crunch typically goes
Ingesting eligibility files and the other supporting data required to serve a large employee population is often the most complex part of a client onboarding process, and it's always the most unpleasant. Employers are excited to talk about new benefits, changes to policies, and the value that they’ll gain from working with a new benefit provider. But data? That’s a chore. There’s nothing fun there. If an implementation team were an army, setting up data processing would be latrine duty.
Unfortunately, it’s also the hardest part of the implementation. For many companies, data integration represents 70% of the total time and effort to onboard a new employer. The process is riddled with complexity, from outdated data exchange formats to byzantine eligibility rules to downright dirty data. And while every benefit provider has their preferred data exchange standard, the honest ones will admit that employers are rarely able to use it. If someone’s going to cry during a new client onboarding, I’ll bet you it will be over the data.
What if you could give this problem to someone else?
At Dart Health, we recognize that data exchange is hard and that every data handoff requires some customization. Rather than fight that fact, we optimized for it! Our Data Nexus is built with a unique “custom at the edges, standard at the core” approach that allows us to quickly take in employee-related data in any format, standardize it, and pass it on to our customers, the benefit providers, in a clean data stream using modern APIs. And because data is our sole focus, we can onboard new employers in weeks rather than months. We’ll even handle the data integration conversations with your clients, removing the pain from your implementation team altogether.
Imagine this: in the next implementation kickoff meeting, you say, “And this is Christine from Dart Health Technology, our data processing partner. She’ll be working with you to get your eligibility file into our system, so just show her your data format and Dart will take it from there. It should only take a couple of weeks.”
Boom. No more tears.
