Importance of updating the employee’s address with your insurance carrier

At Hershenberg & Stone-Walsh Insurance Services, we focus on Employee Benefits.  Our goal is to enhance our client’s employee benefits programs and to make the administration as easy as possible. Below is a common but easy to fix issue we see:

The most common reason that employees and office managers reach out to us is employees not receiving their insurance ID cards and/or their Explanation of Benefits in the mail.  Although there could be a few reasons why, the most common is that the employee did not update their home or mailing address after they moved.  An incorrect address can create a few a few issues for the employee.  The 1^st issue is that many healthcare providers will not see a patient unless they have a current ID Card at the time of the appointment. The 2^nd issue is that insurance companies mail out plan updates as well as the explanation of benefits statements every time an employee has an insurance claim.  These statements are crucial for employees and is their first line of defense if there are any issues with their claims.  Also, in today’s environment of information breaches, having insurance ID cards and confidential information sent to an incorrect address can potentially lead to sensitive information being released into the wrong hands.

What can you do to help make sure that we have accurate information?  Please communicate the importance of a correct address with the employee and email us as soon as possible if they notify you of an address change.  Unfortunately, most of the time, the insurance companies will not allow an employee to update their own address over the phone and they will direct the employee back to you to make the change.  If this occurs, please let us know and we are happy to assist in getting the addresses updated. If your company uses our online employee benefits platform, you can also direct the employee to login to their benefits website to make the change. We will be notified from EASE that a change has been made and we will notify the insurance company. As always, we appreciate working with you and hope that this will insure a smoother process for you and the employees.