HS&BA

Recently, a renowned survey has revealed that 79% of employees would opt for additional benefits in place of a pay raise. To that end, most labor union organizations collaborating with third-party administrators (TPA) and are migrating to self-funded healthcare plans to gain greater control over the benefits. Keeping in mind the critical role they play, TPAs like HS&BA have invested into the market of tech-enabled solutions, cost containment strategies, and improved health plans to help employers effectively carry out this ‘goodwill gesture’ and persuade their employees to deliver the best service to their clients.

Miguel Taime, President, Arturo Miramontes, COO and Coleen Christophersen, Senior Account Executive discuss how they manage the complex Taft Hartley employee benefit needs through superior customer service, technology, quality, and integrity.

How is HS&BA established in the Employee Benefits space as a TPA?

For over 33 years, HS&BA has been providing Taft- Hartley Employee Benefits management and managing health and pension benefits for many unions in North California. HS&BA partners with leading healthcare providers, including Kaiser and Blue Shield of California, to name a few, and handle claims administration with the help of a team of expert claims examiners. The examiners collaborate with providers to administer submitted claims and ensure timely reimbursements based on specific plan rules. HS&BA essentially, collects employer contributions and provides their employees with all benefits eligibility subject to their wage schedules and agreements. HS&BA focuses on training their staff to ensure the information all members receive is the best quality services whenever they are needed.

HS&BA also provides pension administration for their clients and offers a step-by-step guided process to the membership as they reach point of retirement. Pension and Annuity plan rules can be complicated, our knowledgeable staff takes the time to help members understand the rules and process to ensure they understand and make the right decisions at retirement age.

Regardless of the Trust funds that we manage, we pride ourselves on providing excellent and exceptional customer service to clients and their members.

How has HS&BA pivoted itself during the pandemic, and what challenges did it notice clients facing recently?

The biggest challenge that employers face revolves around the ever-changing mandates, and the pandemic has undoubtedly further accelerated the security mandates and additional requirements. Employers allow employees to work from home. HS&BA hires employees who have decades of knowledge in the industry and thoroughly understand the mechanisms of the employee benefits, IT programming, and security requirements to manage benefits administration effectively. HS&BA is proud of providing such unmatched services to its client throughout the pandemic, helping them adapt quickly to the new normal.

Our priority is the safety of our employees. HS&BA has invested in technology and security over the last several years, which allowed us to quickly deploy our employees to work from home. Our disaster recovery and business continuity plan included setting up a remote workforce for disasters such as pandemics. As a result, 90% of all mail to our office are now scanned, indexed, and delivered digitally to our staff. We leverage innovations like virtual desktops that allow them to work from home or office via a secure web portal, we have also implemented multifactor authentication to increase our security posture and ensure we minimize the potential for a breach. In addition, we also deployed an internal operational ticketing system to effectively streamline business operations and process applications faster. With the additional insight into our scanned data, managers are better equipped to monitor work coming in and out of the mailroom. The use of production dashboards for each of our departments has enabled us to have more efficiently track and monitor all of our work. The disaster that was the pandemic has created a silver lining for us and created more awareness, and supervisors can now see the output of each employee and have the comfort level of knowing that they are doing an excellent job while working from home. As well as provide those statistics and tracking reports to our board of trustees. Making them more aware of our progress.

We are a privately held TPA with a solid team that focuses on customer service. We are committed to improving participant and employer customer satisfaction by continuing to invest in employee training, technology advancement and overall process improvements

What, according to you, are the distinct features of HS&BA that give it a competitive edge?

HS&BA is committed to remaining a privately held company. Our goal is to give an employee-centric place of work for our staff that, in turn, motivates them to deliver great service to clients. A happy and knowledgeable employee always translates into best-in-class customer service. We also have an open-door policy, where employees can easily give us feedback anonymously if they wish. During the pandemic, we renovated it into a digital feedback box where staff can drop their feedback, recommendations, grievances, and we review them. Over the past couple of years, we have received incredible feedback that led to process improvements, technology adoptions, and automation. To sum up, we believe that the best way to build partnerships with our employees and new clients is to gain and respect their needs and trust.

Are there any specific improvements that HS&BA plans to roll out soon?

We indeed have some exciting announcements coming soon that will immensely benefit our employees, clients and their members in the future. What we can reveal about our goal is that HS&BA is looking forward to growing its business in terms of services and value-centric revenues. We are committed to finding new opportunities. Some of our clients already have the self-service portals which allow members to have access to all of their information at their fingertips, allowing them to be more aware of their hours and eligibility in real time. Soon members will be able to enrol for pensions and employee benefits applications online as well. In addition, we are improving our phone system by adding technologies, such as interactive voice response (IVR), that will allow customers to chat with our customer service agents. In a nutshell, we will undergo several technology improvements which will make us the leader in technology for Taft Hartley Trust Fund clients. We do not ever want to be the biggest TPA, we are shooting to be known as the best and have no doubt that is where we are heading. Our relationships are first, and always will be.