Premium Billing HR Technology Solution!
In response to changes in the marketplace, new HR technologies are spurring greater broker and agent productivity, supporting a rapid expansion of voluntary benefits, and responding to the diversity in employer plans to recruit and retain talent. Today, digital technology connects participants in sharing data, eliminating latency, automating tasks, and facilitating payments to carriers. Technology is the keystone to strengthening collaboration among brokers, producers, HR operations, TPAs, and carriers.
AdminaHealth CEO and Founding Member, Robert A. Bull, recognized that enrollment and benefits administration functions are frequently hampered by the extensive use of complicated, error-prone spreadsheets and manual activities to fulfill modern, mission-critical premium billing functions. In 2018, when Bull and his team launched the AdminaHealth Billing Suite®, the market was primed to embrace an automated SaaS solution on its path to digital transformation. Participants saw the value of extending enrollment, benefits administration, and payroll investments to include automated premium billing.
The patented AdminaHealth Billing Suite automates enrollment, invoice, and payroll reconciliation and streamlines payment management, allowing money transfer between group and carrier — while the group maintains fiduciary ownership until the carrier receives the money. When working with brokers and employer groups, automation enables them to quickly find and eliminate errors before they impact employees. They can be confident that the right employees are enrolled in the right plans and that they are paying the right premium amounts.
For carriers, the AdminaHealth Billing Suite provides a single billing process that works across all enrollment platforms, allowing them to digitally present a reconciled bill to their customers that reflects all lines of coverage, including resold coverages. The ability to create error-free and timely bills enables carriers to accelerate bringing new products to market, as well as expedite paying broker commissions. Additionally, groups can digitally process payments to carriers, TPAs, and other benefit providers within the Billing Suite.
We spoke with the AdminaHealth leadership team to learn more about this innovative company on the cutting edge of billing technology.
Rob, you’ve been at the helm since AdminaHealth was launched in 2018. Can you tell us about the founding? What was missing in the space that you thought you could provide?
Our parent company, Salus Finance, was founded in 2014 and offered a risk-mitigating financial liquidy product. The liquidity product gave more groups the ability to take advantage of the many benefits and cost savings of self-funding. However, we quickly realized that the standalone value of the reconciliation and consolidation capabilities of our platform was missing in the marketplace, and these could help businesses beyond just those transitioning to self-funding. We launched the AdminaHealth Billing Suite in 2018 as a scalable SaaS solution with enhanced capabilities to service billing operations for fully insured, self-funded, and hybrid plans from any enrollment partner.
What are AdminaHealth’s greatest assets?
Yes, we’re a technology company, but our people are our greatest asset. They want to make a difference and are excited about their work and collaborating with each other and our clients, who are absolutely fantastic.
Billing isn’t easy. On the front lines, benefits billing professionals are struggling with data problems such as incorrect plan rates; duplicate entries; charges, adds, terms, and changes due to life events, and more. Many need the ability to allocate benefit costs across multiple departments or locations. They are generally doing the reconciliation, consolidation, and allocation work manually, comparing spreadsheets and other data sources, which leads to high error rates—if they are even reconciling at all. When they start working with our Customer Success team and implementing automation, we see our clients and partners quickly gain confidence. During the first few months, as they clean up their data, they start to realize better cash flow, increasingly fewer fire drills to fix issues, and oftentimes positive ROI before they even go live!
For more on Customer Success, we spoke with Tim Sakayev, AdminaHealth’s Chief Customer Success Officer!
Tim, you work directly with AdminaHealth’s clients. What have you noticed that’s been most helpful for them?
There are three key areas that make a significant impact:
- The platform is purpose-built by billing experts. Our design simplifies the user experience and focuses users’ attention on where their input is needed: discrepancies.
- The platform consolidates data from disparate sources and presents it in a consistent “apples-to-apples” comparison, relieving users from having to transform data. It frees up people to do only what they can do: resolve discrepancies. The platform also provides a “total view” of billing for any given month, giving executives valuable insights into the overall benefits billing picture.
- Support & Customer Success. AdminaHealth’s Customer Success team works hard to live up to its name and provide white-glove support to our clients and help them meet their specific needs. The team consists of highly-experienced and trained professionals who thrive on challenges and can configure the platform to satisfy even the most unique billing requirements.
In working with companies that are transitioning from manual or legacy billing services, what’s the biggest benefit to them in moving to an automated platform?
Ultimately, it’s about lowering the cost and increasing the accuracy of the monthly reconciliation and consolidation process, and finding billing discrepancies. The major benefits of the Billing Suite are four-fold:
Reconciliation time savings. Reconciliation on the platform takes mere seconds, and the data is clearly presented for review—no more spreadsheets, lookups, manually mapping names every month, or rearranging columns from many different source systems.
Consolidation time savings. The platform consolidates data from disparate sources and presents it to the user, eliminating the need to map, modify, or edit data.
Transparency, consistency, and repeatability. The interface is designed to optimize the workflow. No more manually changing the worksheet month to month; the only task is handling the few exceptions. Output is consistent and designed to provide maximum clarity and transparency into reconciliation. A history of bills with a complete audit trail is readily available, reducing the time to investigate mismatches flagged by the platform.
Human error reduction. Once configured, the process is “on rails” – i.e., the platform is consistent month over month, doesn’t get bored, doesn’t make copy-paste mistakes, and doesn’t get distracted.
How has AdminaHealth surpassed your clients’ expectations? Can you give some examples?
One of the “wow” moments is when the system highlights ongoing billing discrepancies, even before full implementation. Our implementation is an iterative process that loads the data and presents it to our client for validation as soon as possible. It’s very common during the very first iteration for the system to highlight a set of discrepancies. Clients see these early results and say, “We’ll be able to get some of this money back!” That’s value to the client before the system is even live.
We also spoke with longtime leadership member Laura Bull, AdminaHealth’s COO & CISO.
Laura, you’ve been with AdminaHealth for several years. As you’ve watched the company mature, what is one area where you’ve noticed significant growth?
We’re always looking for ways to enhance the seamless user experience, which starts with client feedback about new features and future improvements. Another area where we’ve grown significantly is our consistent delivery of premier service. All AdminaHealth employees are based in the U.S., which allows each client to have a dedicated Implementation Manager who is available during business hours, both for the implementation and ongoing support. Clients value the ability to pick up the phone or send an email, knowing it will be answered promptly by their support team, who are knowledgeable about their specific implementation.
As the head of information security, can you tell us about AdminaHealth’s certifications to keep clients’ HIPAA data secure?
AdminaHealth made the decision early on to adopt the ® NIST Cybersecurity Framework and the HITRUST Common Security Framework, which is based on ISO 27001 and HIPAA. The AdminaHealth Billing Suite is HITRUST r2 certified, a globally recognized validation that provides arguably the highest assurance available that we are in compliance with industry security standards.
What do you see as AdminaHealth’s differentiator in the insurtech industry?
Information security controls have always been at the forefront of our architecture, with all operations based solely in the United States, including development, customer success, and sales and marketing. Our U.S. team has built the cloud billing suite with security and compliance as a key differentiator in the industry. We continue to mature and adapt to the ever-changing security landscape.
Dennis Reaves, AdminaHealth’s Chief Technology Officer, is the engine behind rolling out the platform’s innovative features.
Dennis, you came out of retirement to work at AdminaHealth. What attracted you?
I’ve had a long career in both large, publicly traded companies and small, venture-backed startups, and I know that the people on a team and the investors backing the idea are the most important factors for success. The work ethic and values of AdminaHealth’s team, particularly those of the investment team and CEO Rob Bull, align perfectly with my own and the desire to build a high-growth company where people are valued and respected. That vision attracts the talented folks who come to work each day with positive energy.
What do you find most exciting about developing cutting-edge technology?
A lot of the technology we work on today was just science fiction when I started my career in the 1980s. Working on a platform that forces us to evaluate better solutions continually gives me the opportunity to explore all the latest tools that leverage advances in computing power. For example, one of our core value propositions is that clients can give us their data in any shape, and we can take it from there. The old-school strategy would be to force them to spend resources on re-shaping their data to fit rigid data specifications. We’re adaptable and perform our function at the junction between many different systems and data formats. Providing that function at scale requires us to explore new and modern ways of thinking about data, like API-first architecture and AI data handling.
Where do you see AdminaHealth’s technology five years down the road?
AdminaHealth is API-first, so every platform can use it to reconcile, consolidate, and pay bills. Our service is an essential part of benefits management. In five years, due to the complexity of billing, rather than building their own solutions, I expect AdminaHealth will be the platform of choice for all across the employee benefits insurance market. It’s impossible to compete with us on robustness and maturity. The smart choice is to white-label our API-first platform so that you have a complete and tailored solution right out of the box.
Last, we spoke with Younes Ismael-Aguirre, CA, CPA, AdminaHealth’s Chief Financial Officer.
Younes, you are the most recent addition to leadership. What surprised you most about working with this team?
I was incredibly excited to join this dynamic group and work with them on the financial aspects of growing AdminaHealth even further. I’m most impressed with how knowledgeable each member of the leadership team is within their area of expertise and how they excel in their role. Together, we bring many different views and opinions to the table.
To what do you attribute the company’s success?
AdminaHealth’s success rests within our core values, the quality of our products, and the meaningful impact we make in enabling our clients to provide the best benefits packages to employees.
Just as important, our leadership team is committed to employee work-life balance. All of our staff are excited to come to work every day and provide best-in-class service to our clients. We work closely with clients to find cost savings, which allows them to reinvest in their businesses and their employees.
Creating the Future of Benefits Billing
AdminaHealth continually finds new ways to automate business processes and issues new software releases to meet the expanding needs of its customers. Premium billing is a multifaceted process that involves the combination of many data streams. Increased automation, self-service, new functionality, and customized reporting are only a few items on this year’s roadmap.
“One of our foundational philosophies is to be agnostic in the platforms that provide us data,” says Bull. AdminaHealth ingests data from any enrollment, benefits administration system, payroll application, and more than 130 carriers. The diverse sources provide the customer data needed to manage a full suite of benefits and are also an important bridge connecting agents and carriers.
AdminaHealth’s patented, cloud-based automated SaaS premium billing solution rises to meet customer needs and challenges. The HR industry can now rely on technology that simplifies billing and say goodbye to manually intensive and error-prone reconciliation and consolidation processes. Instead of pouring over spreadsheets, users can now simply review an Exceptions tab and generate a consolidated invoice, as well as send digital payments. The future is bright for the employee benefits industry, with AdminaHealth filling a significant gap.
“When prospects participate in AdminaHealth webinars, the feedback we often receive is ‘Where have you been? I needed you years ago!” says Bull.
