Client Stewardship can be a critical element of any well-managed risk management program. At best, it can illuminate areas of opportunity, generate targeted recommended actions for improvement, and quantify anticipated financial benefit from capitalizing on those opportunities. Yet sometimes, Stewardship can mean wasted opportunities, where clients are given a “report of the news” rather than targeted recommendations that tie back to objectives.
At GB, we’ve enhanced our Stewardship in 2022, continuing to build out a robust, industry-leading approach to ensure that the end product generates meaningful insights and actions.
One of our key goals in enhancing our Stewardship approach was to reorient around the objectives we share with our clients—the outcomes that matter most. Rather than focusing solely on the metrics, we have developed shared objectives, with the intent of driving actionable insights for our clients and holistically assessing the health of our clients’ programs to improve claim outcomes.
From a solid foundation of having the right objectives (and metrics against those objectives), we believe service excellence is paramount to delivering actionable insights. To us, that means a Stewardship process that is not a one-and-done meeting but rather a yearlong engagement. It means having the technology and tools to deliver customization through interactive, dynamic dashboards, not merely static reporting. And of course, it also means bringing in the right experts from across the organization, at the right time, to aid in decision-making, whether that be our risk-control team, managed care consultants, or claims specialists.
To be sure, the quality of insights is one of the most important aspects of Stewardship. To generate richer, more meaningful insights, we believe a critical ingredient is precise benchmarking. We developed SMART benchmarking (Severity Mix Adjusted Rating Technique) in 2016 to ensure that our clients have the most apples-to-apples benchmarking of claims outcomes in our industry. Using an algorithmically derived approach, whereby we match the individual complexity of each of our clients’ claims to hundreds of other like-kind claims, helps give clarity on where to focus efforts toward program improvement. In parallel to precise benchmarking, trending analysis provides transparency into how a client’s performance varies over time, whether shown in “triangle” form or for multiple years at the same maturity (for example, at 12 months). We’ve organized our Stewardship with an overall executive level scorecard—tied to metrics pertaining to our shared objectives—that measures current year activity against SMART benchmarks and historical experience. We then provide a concise package of slides that follow immediately to give a good, high-level understanding of each of the metrics on our overall objectives. From there, we provide a richly detailed appendix, which allows our team and our client services colleagues to drill down to root cause.
Beyond opportunity identification, our mission is to identify root cause beyond the “what.” For example, if a client sees a rise in medical costs, we may pinpoint that the rise is due to increased nurse case management spend while other drivers have remained relatively constant. Further, as we compare this client’s case management utilization to GB’s SMART benchmark and see that the client is over-utilizing field case managers, we’d make a targeted recommendation to recalibrate his or her case management utilization through our decision support–guided approach to case management, called Waypoint Clinical Guidance.
Ultimately, our goal is to deliver targeted recommendations and action items with accountable owners so that we can continue to improve programs. Our clients shouldn’t have to dig through the weeds to find solutions—that’s part and parcel of what makes a Stewardship effective.
To learn more about our enhanced Stewardship process, please reach out to Dan Link at Daniel_link@gbtpa.com.
Disclaimer: The information contained herein is offered as risk and claims management industry guidance and provided as an overview of current market risks and available programs and is intended for discussion purposes only. This publication is not intended to offer legal advice or client-specific risk management advice. General descriptions contained herein do not include complete definitions, terms, and/or conditions, and should not be relied on for claims management interpretation. Actual claims and risk management policies must always be consulted for full coverage details and analysis. Copyright © 2021 Gallagher Bassett Services, Inc.