Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

Without taking a more aggressive approach to improving patient safety, any reform efforts, including the initiatives generated by the Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act and multiple private sector projects, will be severely compromised.

According to a recent study from the University of London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies, children whose mothers work during their early years do as well at school as those with stay-at-home moms.

There's a convergence of events and trends that will make or break the success of many employers’ benefit plans this year, suggests guest blogger Dani McCauley. However, a spot-on communications plan will smooth the road ahead, and can even turn risks into opportunities.

Communication of benefits isn't easy. It's one of the reasons we pay tribute to the best of internal communication of benefits every year with the i-COMM Awards. Here's how to enter.

For individuals to be informed consumers, they need to be able to compare prices for similar healthcare services. You can do this when you buy a car, or a house, or a pair of socks, but until recently it’s been almost impossible to compare prices for healthcare services. This is slowly changing.

In a recent survey, three-quarters of employees say they think their employer will educate them about changes to their health care coverage as a result of health care reform, yet only 13% of employers say educating employees about reform is important to their organization. This educational disconnect is troubling.

You may have binders stuffed with reports from your health plan, and still be starving for useful information. Guest blogger Linda K. Riddell offers two ways to cut the clutter and beef up your insights: Slow down the frequency of reports, and make sure reports have the right level of detail.

Guest blogger Adam Miloro maintains the issue concerning 401(k) loans continues to be the lack of education surrounding them. It’s true there are certain situations where taking a loan from one’s retirement plan could make sense, he writes, but for many employees loans signify a much larger problem: living beyond one's means.

You say "tomato," I say "tomahhto." There's a big difference between questions and data requests. Guest blogger Linda K. Riddell says benefits professionals must learn to use the right language so they can ask relevant questions to get the most from their health plan data.

Guest blogger Heath Shackelford suggests employers’ focus on measuring the return on investment for wellness programs is distracting from the real effects these programs can have.