Wellness

With the ACA’s employer mandate on the horizon, many employers with part-time and variable hour employees are also re-evaluating their benefit offerings for part-time employees.

Commentary: Your new wellness vendor’s presentation showed impressive results from their work with other clients – risk factors reduced, cost curves bent, and ROI blossomed. It all sounds terrific.

All comprehensive wellness platforms should consist of four core programs — wellness, disease management, EAP and work life components — says Yale Mallinger of wellness company HMC-HealthWorks, but it’s what makes up those components that counts.

Gone are the days of hula chairs and ThighMasters at the desk, new technologies and wearable devices are playing into the benefits and wellness strategies of employers, Amy McDonough, Fitbit’s director of wellness, told conference goers at the 2014 Employee Benefits Forum & Expo, being held this week in Boca Raton, Fla.

Health care reform has presented employers plenty of new challenges to grapple with when it comes to offering health care coverage, and, many say, has expanded the critical role of benefit advisers who heed the call.

With the Affordable Care Act’s employer shared responsibility reporting requirements for 2015 quickly approaching, benefit advisers should already be working with employer clients to implement benefit administration systems to ensure compliance with the law, industry experts say.

Hallmark’s director of wellness engagement shares her company’s success tactics and provides tips on how advisers can help their clients to start a program and make it successful.

A new self-service tool for employers and brokers aims to make the RFP process for pharmacy benefit plans a little easier.

In an era when health care consumerism is being touted as a game-changer for employer-sponsored benefits, offering employees a variety of choices when it comes to how and where they fill their drug prescriptions is an important satisfaction driver.

As more and more companies are flooded with administrative duties due to the Affordable Care Act, cloud-based HR and benefits systems such as Zenefits are starting to gain a substantial hold in the employer market.