Rising healthcare costs can be due to many reasons such as medical inflation or due to demand/supply.

As an HR who is responsible for compensation and benefits, it is imperative for you to provide the best care to your employees with the budget allocated to you by your management.

Here are three strategies you can use to reduce cost if you are using HealthMetrics.

This feature allows HRs to control how much an employee is allowed to spend per visit. Setting a budget limit allows you to control overcharging by clinics as well as ensuring that employees don't take the wrong advantage of the benefits you have provided to them.

You can also set different budget limits for different benefit groups.

The latest addition to HealthMetrics' extensive list of features is the new Panel Access Policy (Bell Curve). Under the new Panel Access, GPs are grouped into four different pricing categories (as shown in the image above). The pricing categories update dynamically every month through actual claims data from nationwide transactions of most common employee healthcare claims – such as flu and fever.

As an HR, you are now not able to control access to GP panels based on average prices and only able to control access to GP panels based on average prices but also manage access for all panel types based on specific areas and locations.

This allows you as an HR to control access not only based on price but based on location as well.

If your costs are high due to your employees' visiting clinics for unnecessary small matters, then taking advantage of the co-payment feature might just curb that behaviour. The co-payment basically enforces employees to pay a small contribution fee each time they visit a clinic. This amount is set by you using one of the two following options:

Fixed Amount Per Visit (Example: RM 5 per visit)
Fixed Percentage of Overall Bill (Example: 5% of the total bill)
The co-payment feature will thus encourage your employees to only visit clinics for important matters. The amount of RM 5 mentioned above may seem small to pay in hindsight but we have seen a significant impact from it when it comes to reducing cost