AGENCY ACTION ALERT FOR MAY 6, 2015

This week's Agency Action Alert covers the following topics:

Business news explains more employers are choosing tiered plan designs
New look for emails coming from Distribution Administration

Please share this information with your sub-agents by forwarding this email, posting this content to your internal website, or copying and pasting the text into another format.

HIGHMARK UPDATE

Business news explains more employers are choosing tiered plan designs

A recent article on the front page of the business section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette highlights the recent decision by the Allegheny County School Consortium to choose two of Highmark's Community Blue Flex products as their exclusive health plan offerings for the upcoming benefit year.

The article also notes that the Consortium made this decision, to a great extent, based on a study by Comparion Medical Analytics. This independent study found that many of the most expensive hospitals in the area did not earn the highest quality rankings.

The article also quotes from a 2014 Kaiser Family Foundation study that shows 19 percent of employers now offer health benefits with "tiered networks," in which members pay more when they choose more expensive hospitals. Highmark's suite of Community Blue Flex products embraces this idea.

Please contact your Highmark client manager to learn more about these innovative product options.

COMMUNICATIONS UPDATE

New look for emails coming from Distribution Administration

Now all emails coming from Distribution Administration will have a new look, with a cleaner, simpler header on each one (see header of this Agency Action Alert for an example).

We will continue to categorize our emails using our headers for Agency Action Alerts (sent on Wednesdays), our Channel Insights header for our bi-monthly newsletter, and our topic-specific headers (e.g. Portal Update, Small Group Update) for our time-sensitive emails sent on an ad-hoc basis.