Every year, open enrollment brings a flurry of complexity and stress for everyone. Long wait times, chaotic internal processes, and an unacceptably high rate of issues for members frequently push traditional workflows and systems to the breaking point.

Noyo is helping to change that with API solutions to manage OE complexity across carriers and lines of coverage. Our growing network of partners use Noyo to automate enrollment workflows, eliminate file-based work, and enable real-time transparency for every member change. 

Here’s how our team and technology came together in 2022 to deliver a seamless transition into the new plan year.

OE 2022 in review

Last year, the Noyo platform and team processed over 113k current and new plan year member changes during the OE period via API (no files or blackout periods), representing a 4x increase in volume compared to the previous year. Our carrier and benefits software partners are choosing to scale with Noyo because our technology offers a faster, more reliable, and more transparent experience that's far less work for their teams.

Here's what open enrollment looked like this year:

• Clean, trusted data: During the OE period, Noyo round-trip confirmation automatically identified 2,417 potential mismatches between the carrier and ben-admin systems that could impact member coverage. Many of these would have otherwise gone undetected.
  
  

• Faster change processing: Despite catching and resolving a high volume of issues, Noyo completed 96% of member changes within 7 business days with the majority of enrollments completed almost instantly. On average, 95% of transactions reach the carrier within 15 minutes.
  
  

• Less work: Our records show that 92% of changes were processed and confirmed by Noyo without any intervention from our connected partners. Our partners only needed to be involved in a small percentage of their total OE volume on the Noyo platform.

Preparing our partners for success

Strong collaboration with our partners is very important to Noyo. Here’s how we supported our benefits software and carrier partners during open enrollment in 2022 before, during, and after the season.

Before open enrollment

• Proactive engagement. We held an OE kickoff with each one of our benefits software partners to align on workflows, review important policies, set expectations on carrier turnaround time during this high volume time period, review enhancements to reporting packages, and check in on active initiatives underway.
  
  

• A clean slate for groups. Prior to the OE period, Noyo proactively audited each group to identify issues that could impact coverage or cause friction going into open enrollment. This ensured every group was up to date, limiting the number of issues that could occur as enrollment volumes spiked. To do this, the Noyo platform triggered a full sync with the carrier, pulling down the current state of enrollments and comparing that fresh data to the expected enrollments from the ben-admin system. We then surfaced the issues we uncovered so ben-admins could quickly review and resolve them.
  
  

• Automatic plan updates. Traditionally, ben-admins have to keep track of many plan details, timelines, and requirements for every carrier in the lead-up to open enrollment. The Noyo data platform streamlines this work. Ben-admins communicate group plan decisions in advance of OE and since Noyo has direct access to the carrier system, we're able to check the carrier daily and automatically notify platforms when plans are set up and groups are ready for enrollment to begin.

During open enrollment

• Simple, automated workflows: Instead of spending weeks configuring files for each group, benefits software platforms used the Noyo API to manage current year changes and submit enrollments for the new plan year. This delivered a simple, standardized workflow across carriers and lines of coverage. No messy files or blackouts.
  
  

• Group health monitoring: Noyo internal tooling monitored the health of each group managed on our platform and the efficiency of each data connection between the ben-admin and carrier. This monitoring meant we could pass insights to our partners and help them better manage open enrollment volume. It also let us identify areas of friction before they became problems.
  
  

• Round-trip confirmation: We provided an automatic feedback loop for every enrollment change, directly from the carrier system. This ensured enrollment changes were successfully completed at the carrier to prevent downstream billing and access-to-care issues.

After open enrollment

• No last-minute surprises: Our benefits platform users were able to monitor all transaction statuses for current year and new plan year changes in the Noyo dashboard with near real-time data direct from the carrier.
  
  

• Group offboarding: After open enrollment, sometimes a group changes carriers or ben-admin solutions, or doesn’t pay their invoice, which can be hard for ben-admins to track traditionally. Noyo made it possible for our ben-admin partners to be proactive by tracking these changes.

“A quiet open enrollment season is a successful open enrollment season. We love knowing that during our partners’ hardest time of year, things were less stressful because of Noyo.- Brooke Connelly, Senior Manager, Operations, Noyo

A direct impact on the member experience

Better data leads to better outcomes, especially when that data is in the right place at the right time. Here are two stories from our 2022 open enrollment season that illustrate how the Noyo platform can have a direct impact for our customers and their members’ lives.

Catching an EOI discrepancy before it impacted members

Due to a miscommunication between a leading benefits software and life insurance carrier, employees were allowed to elect or increase voluntary life coverage without evidence of insurability — despite the carrier requiring one to process member changes.

Noyo identified this discrepancy in our round-trip confirmation process and flagged it as an issue to resolve for both parties. This was promptly done, preventing friction for thousands of members and ensuring coverage was accurately enrolled for the group in everyone’s systems.

Alerting the ben-admin of group number changes

For a leading benefits software platform, Noyo automatically identified that a handful of groups that were expected to be set up in the carrier system were not present. Upon surfacing this discrepancy, the benefits software found out they had these groups set up under the wrong group number because they had moved states.

Noyo was able to correct this issue before the ben-admin platform submitted enrollments for the new plan year, thereby smoothing the way for these groups to go through open enrollment.

“I used to have to keep track of so many rules for open enrollment... Now, I just let Noyo’s APIs handle it, and I can be confident that everything is done right." - Grant Reeves, Director of Customer Operations, Sana

The power of a tech-enabled approach 

In 2022, our partners enjoyed new levels of ease, speed, and transparency. Because we handled all interactions with carriers, benefits software were free to focus on better serving their brokers and groups. And because we prepared benefits software to proactively audit and clean their data, carriers were able to reduce the wave of coverage issues and support requests their teams would normally have to manage. The result was a seamless experience for all.

Interested in how cleaner data and faster connectivity could transform your team's enrollment experience? Reach out for a call.