Benefits portal adoption numbers fail to meet employers' expectations

HR and benefits managers have latched onto employee benefits portals to reinforce employees' accountability for their health choices -- and ultimately control costs. But only 60% of employees offered a portal have ever used it. Companies that rolled out extensive benefits portals without regard for the goals that drive employees to self-service are now facing the same site adoption disappointments as many health plans. Employers need to understand the Technographics characteristics of the employees who will use portals and enhance their portal experience before they can expect to see portal use take off.

Portal design best practices will help spur employee adoption

Best practices for portal implementation include setting clear goals, using Scenario Design, and providing for ongoing usability support. Forrester's advice for portal designers:

• Create employee personas to understand the most important users. Firms that can't foot the bill for skilled outside help can interview target users and then write narrative descriptions of their needs, goals, preferences, and pet peeves.

• Prioritize good design over personalization so that all employees can accomplish their goals. Less than 10% of users customize their home page, so firms must prioritize the content and functions required for the most important tasks.

• Plan to design portal user interfaces (UIs) for employees' specific needs even when using portal software. Call on outside help for a major initiative like an HR self-service portal or hire interaction designers and usability engineers to do this in-house.

• Expect technology to change culture.

• Start without a metrics plan.

• Let programmers design the user interface.

• Let a single group set priorities.

• Stick IT with the bill.

athenahealth redefines the billing service business

Jonathan Bush, CEO of athenahealth, visited us recently to talk about his firm's success in helping physician practices shed their inefficient, paper-heavy revenue cycle processes. athenahealth's Web-based practice management tools, knowledge of payers' rules, and business process outsourcing (BPO) services are winning over midsize practices and shaking up the competition. Providers' BPO adoption poses another source of competition to clearinghouses, sends other billing service bureaus scrambling for new technology to keep up, and demonstrates to struggling PMS vendors the value-add of services.

We are very interested in your feedback on our research. Do you have topics to recommend, data you would like to have, or technologies you want assessed? Drop me a line with your input at bradholmes@forrester.com.


Brad Holmes
Vice President, Research Director, Healthcare & Life Sciences

Research Referenced In This Issue athenahealth: BPO For Doctors (33896) Benefits Portals Don't Deliver On Their Potential (34044) Best Practices For Employee Portal Design (16319) Europeans' Online Health Habits Revealed (33733) Five Ways To Spoil Your Enterprise Portal (33252) Healthcare: How Right Were We In 2003? (33608) Rx Purchasers Support Drug Reimportation (33637) Six Technologies Underpin Healthcare Interstructure (33790) Who Wants Consumer-Directed Health Plans (33688)

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