Discovery Benefits leverages the expertise of its employees along with leading-edge technology to successfully create new opportunities.
Ongoing regulatory changes coupled with a highly competitive industry and price points that remain relatively unchanged from 15 years ago require a nimble, adaptive, customer-centric culture in order to stay competitive and profitable. Key reasons for implementing new technology at the third party administrator include a desire to diversify and create new opportunities and more efficient and effective operations.
John Biwer, the company’s president, helps lead the teams in the company’s objective of providing innovative solutions and extraordinary customer service. Discovery has seen tremendous growth due in large part to its employees’ acceptance of and push for change, the engine behind the company’s innovation. Employees accept change as an opportunity to grow and know that in order to innovate effectively, any insight gained must be put into action to make a genuine difference. The ability to adapt and accept new responsibilities, new team configurations, and new job functions is what allows the action to occur quickly and efficiently.
“We’ve watched John Biwer’s leadership drive Discovery Benefits to establish a culture and reputation of leveraging cutting-edge technologies to improve the client experience. This culture means clients get greater accuracy, improved speed, increased transparency, and a higher personal touch,” says John Jenkins, Benaissance/ COBRApoint CEO.
Over the last couple of years, Discovery has spent a great deal of time and effort to beef up its infrastructure to allow the company to expand its service offerings. Examples include expanding COBRA services to include custom billing options; broadening the health reimbursement arrangements market; and creating flexible spending account plan designs that work well with and complement health savings accounts both before and after the high-deductible health plan (HDHP) deductible is met.
A major change and opportunity for Discovery this past year was the addition of CDHC account administrative services as a business process outsourcing (BPO) option, which allows the company to offer private label administration for many large, well-known national corporations. The BPO offering allows Discovery to diversify its book of business and expand its technical infrastructure even more.
“Discovery is to be commended on its innovative and solution-oriented approach to consumer-directed health care,” said Jeff Young, CEO of Lighthouse1. “The company’s strong growth, combined with a diverse set of solutions and commitment to extraordinary customer service, make Discovery an ideal partner in our mission to simplify the business of health care.”
A key initiative was the implementation of an enhanced workflow and imaging system that allowed the company to go paperless overnight. Imaging combined with a workflow system provided an immediate and noticeable improvement in customer service.
Through improved turnaround times, Discovery clients enhanced benchmark reporting and expanded call topic tracking that resulted in more responsive and directed communication for employers and participants.
“Our goal was to focus on increasing internal efficiencies in ways that would directly and positively impact our clients’ experience,” said Biwer.
- Company: Discovery Benefits Inc.
- Headquarters: Fargo, ND
- Website: www.discoverybenefits.com
- No. of employees: 175
- Nature of business: Discovery Benefits is a third party administrator for COBRA compliance, health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts, health reimbursement arrangements, and transit/ parking plans with more than 4,500 clients nationwide composed of more than 2 million eligible employees.
Key executives:
- Mike DiFiore, chief financial officer
- Matt Feir, senior vice president
- Kara Johnson, vice president, COBRA Compliance
- Sandy Kjelvik, vice president, Operations
- Amy Perrin, vice president, Benefits Services
- Suzanne Rehr, executive vice president
Key solution providers:
- Benaissance/COBRApoint,
- COBRA and custom billing software platform
- Lighthouse1, reimbursement account (CDHC) software platform
- Hyland, imaging and workflow systems
- E-Doc, custom document management software solutions
- Marco, voice, data, video, and print solutions