How Does Campfire Health Work?
Step 1:
Becoming a Campfire Health client is simple: You’ll keep your same plans in place, exactly as they are, with zero disruption to price, carriers, etc… No contracts of any kind, no onboarding fees, switch back at anytime.
Step 2:
We set you up with your online benefits and utilization monitoring dashboard, and initiate a connection with your payroll to automate deduction calculations. During this step, we also initiate carrier connections to automate enrollments, whenever carriers allow.
Step 3:
We dig into the risk profile of your company through carrier utilization reports and promote biometric screenings to motivate your employees using strategically focussed incentives. The anonymous (and HIPPA compliant) results of these screenings are sent to a third party, which reviews, categorizes, and anonymizes your employee data, which ulimately produces an employee risk report. This data combined with your company’s past utilization amounts (claims vs premiums paid-in), enable us to pursue the best coverage funding strategy taking the health of your employees.
Step 4:
If your company is a good fit, we will recommend that you enroll in a Campfire Community. This can be done any month of the year, or during your standard open enrollment month, for minimum disruption to your employees. Benefits, besides the potential for significant savings, include: Limiting the amount of taxes and fees imposed by the Affordable Care Act on your company, freedom of plan structure (we can design your plans with any coinsurance, co-pay, deductible, out of pocket max, etc…), and the ability to structure built-in wellness incentives into your benefits package. Ultimately, these factors allow you to motivate employees to live healthy lives, while making more informed purchasing decisions for all things health-related.
Step 5:
We review the performance of your group plan quarterly, with particular attention during the 4th quarter. Based on employee patterns, this is when we make changes to the structure of your plan(s), employee incentives, and employee communications.
This is also when you’re notified of any available premium refunds available to your company. Our pay-per-use coverage is designed to give you back any money not needed to keep your plan working, and your employees claims paid.
Step 6:
Rinse, repeat: We’ll continue to monitor, and adjust as needed, enabling you to get the best health and wellness results possible for each dollar spent.
Our Secret sauce:
Transparency
Considering we carve out a large chunk of carrier profit and control, you’ll finally see where your money is actually going. Simply put, you’ll pay for what you use, and you’ll receive a refund for extra premiums paid, all while understanding what you’re actually getting for each dollar spent.
Mindful Consumption
We craft a strategy to incentivize employee behaviors resulting in better health outcomes, less wasted time, and significant savings. Areas of focus include: pharmaceutical sourcing and discounting, preferred/low cost provider utilization, cost-mitigation, and billing audit/adjudication.
Education
We’re committed to making sure your employees are educated and empowered! Starting with the basics, we educate your employees on how their plans work, where to go for care, and how to get ahead of possible health issues with basic procedures like annual check-ups and labs.
Community
By brining your small-to-medium sized company into a pool of similar, low-risk companies, we’re able to give you the benefit of lower cost, and better access to information about your company’s utilization
Empowerment
With Campfire Health, your employees are empowered with the following app-based tools: $0 co-pay Telemedicine visits (doctor visits online), Advocacy: Live help with confusing medical bills, navigating medical networks, cost estimation, and prescription drug savings.
Wellness
We encourage employee health and wellness with helpful and motivational emails, posts, and videos. Not only do we use this to better the lives of your employees, we also use wellness to drive down premium costs.
FAQs:
Why haven't I heard of this before?
There are many reasons you may be unfamiliar with this approach to funding your employee benefits. Some reasons include: Brokers being unfamiliar that this option exists, increased broker expertise required to administer the plans, or even the fact that our plans cost you less, and pay lower commissions compared to many “traditional” health plans.
What will our premium costs be?
Generally speaking, we start you off at the same rate you’re currently paying, all things being equal. This assumes you want to provide similar plans compared to what you have now. Apples to apples, you’re going to save money with Campfire.
Like most things, the lower risk your company poses, the lower your rate will be. This is a huge benefit as previously mentioned, compared to traditional benefits for sub-100 employee companies, which give you the same rate as even the highest-risk companies in their pool. With Campfire, you have the potential to save substantial money, which is returned to you in the form of a year-end refund. Think of it as pay-per-use. The lower your claims are, the more you get back.
What if we want to change or switch plans in the future?
Not a problem! Regardless of what plan you choose to enroll in (or keep as-is) with Campfire Health, there are no contracts, onboarding fees, or obligations.
We rely on results, service, and customer satisfaction to retain you as a client. That’s all there is to it!
How is Campfire Health able to do this - Isn't it extra work for less money?
To answer bluntly, yes, and yes.
Fortunately, there’s plenty on the table, in our opinion. Having said this, we’ve also figured out ways to streamline the process, and quite frankly, we believe in the benefit we’re able to provide to your company and your employees.
There has been an abundance of profit in our industry, and you’ve been feeling this abundance in the form of huge year-over-year premium increases. Now is the time to reverse that trend.
What's all this talk about transparency, and ||access to claims data||, and why does it matter?
Transparency is something that is lacking in the healthcare industry in a huge way.
Health carriers limit access to data for their members, pharmaceutical benefit managers (PBMs) shroud prices behind multiple layers of profit-centers… Hospitals and doctors bill for services at astronomical rates, and have a horrible record of even billing for the right services…
All this to say, there is a huge problem in our industry with transparency, and the average consumer is not armed with enough information to do much about it.
HR and management benefit: We work to provide access to your company’s claims data in a way that the carriers themselves won’t. This is significant, as it helps you understand why you’re being charged the rates you are, and how to incentivize your employees to make better decisions – Taking into consideration any areas of opportunity. (If ER visits were off the charts, for example.)
Employees benefit: We provide tools to help your employees access affordable care, both in-person and online. We also give you the option to provide your employees a concierge service, which helps employees understand things like: Staying in-network to avoid over-paying, accessing the cost of procedures before they decide to move forward, and even help adjudicating confusing medical bills and triaging billing errors.
Is it risky?
The whole point of community-based care is reducing risk.
We like to illustrate it like this:
Buying a standard group of plans to offer your employees from say, Anthem Blue Cross, is like putting your money in a savings account. While the risk is extremely low, so is the value over the long-haul. (Although your money isn’t going to disappear, it’s also not going to grow at any exciting rate). Long-term, this is a really bad idea for a place to invest your money.
Joining a Campfire is similar to buying a group of stocks. While there is technically more risk involved, you’re minimizing that risk by purchasing multiple stocks… While one may go down, the odds of 10 individual stocks all tanking at the same time are very low. For this reason, mutual funds, for example (groups of stocks), are considered the best blend of risk and reward we know today.
Similarly, Campfire Health joins employers together to take advantage of the reduction in risk spread across the group, while still taking advantage of being selective about who is able to join. This technique is used with the intent of keeping the pool of employers performing at rates much higher (or lower, in the case of claims), resulting in a safe, yet money-saving proposition.
Having said this, we stake our reputation on clearly communicating both the upside potential, and any downside risk that is present in your benefits package.
What if we want to keep our same plans, and still use Campfire Health as our broker?
This is not a problem at all! We work with companies of all kinds, on carriers and plans of any kind. The great part about working with us, is this: When the time comes when your company is ready to transition to a more sophisticated benefits package to start saving money, we’ll be right there. In fact, as part of your annual claims review, we look for signs of high or low utilization, which are clear indicators of your best options going forward. Instead of simply taking that “low” rate increase from the carrier when your company has a year with low claims, this means we’ll be in a position to bring your company into a less expensive plan, which often includes more plan options, and more transparency when it comes to seeing how your employees actually use that coverage.