Ingenix TrendView solution helps companies better understand, manage employee medical costs

Ingenix is launching Ingenix^® TrendView™, an affordable, easy-to-use desktop solution designed to help companies better understand and manage a critical expense category - employee medical costs. Ingenix TrendView provides graphical views of consolidated employee benefits usage, enables scenario modeling, and uncovers opportunities for reducing medical costs and improving employee health.

“TrendView is simple to install, requires less than two hours of training and gives employers access to accurate, understandable information.”

With health care spending projected to grow 6.1 percent annually over the next decade, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, employers face intense pressure to control their medical costs while offering competitive health benefits that will attract and retain the best talent.

Ingenix TrendView is a low-cost, flexible online tool that helps companies address these challenges by converting employee health claims data from multiple sources - including multiple health plans serving their employees - into easy-to-understand visual reports. Employers can use these reports to answer a variety of cost-management questions, such as where they might reduce prescription costs by promoting the use of generic versions of brand-name drugs most commonly prescribed to their employees or how they can minimize employee absenteeism through increased use of preventive care.

Employers can also use Ingenix TrendView to perform simple "what if" scenarios to see how changes to their health benefit plans could affect overall medical costs.

"TrendView is revolutionary in its intuitive, visual approach to delivering actionable insights," said Tina Brown-Stevenson, executive vice president, health care innovation and information at Ingenix. "TrendView is simple to install, requires less than two hours of training and gives employers access to accurate, understandable information."

Ingenix TrendView is ideally suited for companies with 2,000 to 10,000 employees that offer multiple health plans, and for health plan management brokers and consultants serving mid-size employers. Because Ingenix TrendView is Web-based, employers need only a PC and an Internet browser to use it.

Ingenix TrendView includes eight tabbed screens (for a product demonstration, click here):

• Summary: Provides an at-a-glance view of the key drivers behind a company's medical costs.
• Enrollment: Shows changes in the number of employees participating in each health plan a company offers, plus key demographic data for participating employees and their dependents.
• Financial: Highlights core cost metrics and trends, such as the medical and prescription benefits paid per employee.
• Scenario Analysis: Enables employers to model the cost impact of proposed changes to their health benefit plans before they make a change.
• Conditions: Provides a visual image of the most common employee medical diagnoses as well as the number of employees receiving care for those conditions and the health benefits paid per employee per condition.
• Pharmacy: Highlights key factors contributing to employee prescription drug costs, such as the split between brand-name vs. generic medications and retail vs. mail-order prescriptions.
• Inpatient: Provides a visual image of the most common types of employee hospital admissions, such as for surgery, and the resulting hospital charges by admission type.
• Outpatient: Highlights the types of outpatient services used by employees, the health benefits paid by service type and the number of employees receiving each type of care.

Each Ingenix TrendView screen is easy to navigate. With one click, employers can view a different time period or type of information, download the data behind any graphic and print reports.