Seated Behind a Health Plan Dashboard

By Clive Riddle, March 21, 2014

Spring has sprung, and if your fancy lightly turns to thoughts of health plans, and in fact you are driven towards such thoughts, a dashboard can be useful. You may be in luck, as Sherlock Company provides a summary from their health plan dashboard as part of their complementary publication, Plan Management Navigator.

Here’s what Sherlock Company reports in their just released March 2014 issue of the Navigator, about the trailing three months ended December 31, 2013, for health plans participating in their dashboard program. Health plans in their Dashboard universe are comprised of Blue Cross Blue Shield and Independent/ Provider-Sponsored Plans.

Health Plan reported “an increase in health revenues of 8.7%. Revenues for Medicaid grew most rapidly, increasing by 17.2%. Medicare Advantage revenue growth followed at 4.7%, while Indemnity product revenues increased 2.7%. ASO/ASC and Managed Care revenues fell by 6.2% and 4.3%, respectively. Overall, membership increased 1.1% for all health lines. Enrollment in Managed Care fell 1.1%, while increasing 1.6% for Indemnity. ASO/ASC membership declined 0.4%.”

“Membership grew in both Medicaid and Medicare by 4.6% and 4.2%, respectively. Both Managed Care and  Medicaid experienced the largest price increases, both at 3.5%. Indemnity followed with a price increase of 1.1%. Medicare Advantage products had a price decrease of 2.3%, while ASO/ASC posted a decline of 5.3%.”

“Health benefit ratios for health lines deteriorated by 2.0 percentage points to 90.0%. Managed Care and Indemnity had the largest increases of 5.4 percentage points and 4.5 percentage points, respectively. The number of scripts per person increased by 0.4 to 9.5 on an annualized basis. E/R visits per thousand members fell 13.4 to an annual rate of 241.8 per thousand, while hospital days also increased by 21.2 days to 335.1 days per thousand. The administrative expense to premium ratio increased 0.6 percentage points to 11.8%, while the administrative costs per member per month increased 2.3% to $34.76. Claims volumes increased 0.87 to 17.7 per member per year, while inquiries per member grew 0.34 to 1.9 per member per year. Staffing ratios fell 0.32 FTEs per 10,000 members to 21.1.”

You can click here if you’d like to subscribe to Sherlock Company’s complementary Plan Management Navigator, which includes additional articles full of great health plan data, benchmarks, and insights like those provided in the Dashboard Summary.