We’ve been posting all across social media for quite some time now, mostly adding commentary to breaking news and intriguing thought pieces on employee benefits.
But for years now we’ve been told by our clients, strategic partners and industry peers, that we really have an interesting approach to employee benefits – so much so that we needed to find ways to demonstrate this thought leadership to others. So with that, we’ve entered the blogosphere.
So let’s start with a little background. We see our role as one of an innovator, a benchmarking and best-practices advocate, a sounding board, and even a provocateur. We like to challenge current thinking in an effort to bring about relevant evolution and sometimes even revolution of approach, where warranted. At the end of the day, we aim to be a trusted advocate for our clients and have an insatiable drive to land the right solutions for our partners and their people.
When we started the JP Griffin Group, we did so to specifically address aspects of the field of employee benefits which we felt were being tremendously under-served by the brokerage community. These included; putting employer/employee interests first, providing compliance support commensurate with the growing complexity of the U.S. healthcare system, and approaching cost containment as a continuous and sustainable effort to “bend the cost curve” vs. simply an annual opportunity to negotiate for lower rates.
Take that last point as an example. Managing employee benefits is not simply an annual activity centered around renewal season; it’s a year-round, on-going effort whereby every action lends itself to in-year cost savings and improvements in patient outcomes, as well as improved rate negotiations at the appropriate time.
Any decent consultant should be able to cut your costs by shopping your plan, changing your plan design, or adjusting employee contributions. But what you deserve, and what we deliver, are creative and sustainable strategic measures which effectively “bend the cost curve” for the long haul.
Like what you hear so far? Great, this is just the beginning. We could go on and on, but we’ll save that for future posts where upcoming topics will include the growing popularity of reference-based pricing, as well as the dramatic rise in specialty drug costs and what you can do about it, just to name a few hot topics.
In the meantime, sign-up to receive instant alerts anytime we update our blog, visit our website, or check back here on a regular basis. Either way, we think it will be time well spent. And if you have an idea for a topic you’d like us to cover, just let us know!