Tech

Massachusetts Life Insurance Co. (MassMutual) has launched a new "Why Life Insurance?" consumer awareness program on Facebook designed to get families thinking and talking about their financial futures.

Even the most able of insurance CIOs may find themselves hard pressed to keep their footing on a rapidly evolving technological playing field. Yet, even if they do, they may find the rules of the game are changing too.

States are looking at different models for their Health Insurance Exchanges, or HIXs. Given that each state will adopt its own approach to HIX implementation, we potentially could end up with 50 different models.

The clock is ticking. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's health insurance exchanges are targeted to come online in 2014, which means open enrollment must begin in the fall of 2013. Every state is determining its approach, and everyone in the industry is strategizing on how to tap into a projected market of 25 million enrollees by 2016. The states will take different approaches, but the common denominator is technology. This month we'll look at how technology will be utilized in exchanges and identify other corresponding services that will be necessary to make the exchanges a success.

With social media so pervasive in our daily lives, it’s easy overlook the fact that enterprise-ready tools to help companies capitalize on the technology are still nascent.

Wellness programs and solutions providers have been around for a while and are continually evolving based on both successes and failures and the continually changing market landscape. The most recent market impact, of course, is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and it continues to loom large. Many of the national, commercial and local brokers we work with each day are deploying wellness solutions as part of their expansion of services. Brokers are on the front lines when it comes to wellness. Many are making use of social business software capabilities to help employees collaborate and participate.

Choose the right format and set realistic goals to make the effort pay off.

Thomson Reuters, a major vendor of business intelligence services and technology spanning multiple industries, intends to divest its health care operations.

Last month we looked at onboarding new employees. In many respects offboarding mirrors onboarding, essentially "undoing" employee onboarding tasks. Because of this, leading onboarding vendors offer tools to manage both processes. However, the offboarding process is different enough to warrant a deeper look. The uniqueness arises out of the fact that, regardless of the circumstances, offboarding is a "good-bye"- the end of a relationship, which is much different than the "hello" welcoming new employees.

It wasn't long after Rick McKinley got his start as a benefits broker that he encountered one of his biggest frustrations in the business: data overload.