Client background

An employee-owned administrator of pre-tax consumer benefits including Health Savings Accounts (HSA), Flex Spending Accounts (FSA), Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA), commuter benefits and others. They provide services for other businesses as well as individual clients enrolled in their plans.

The business challenge

The client was looking for a way to maintain the COBRA team size of two people. However, when the daily number of files received continued to grow, manual opening, reviewing and changing of files created an increase in errors missed and quickly became unmanageable.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly created a customized file processing system that extended the previously used platform functionality to: 

• Give the company access to view and research data for client-facing customer reps to answer questions without involving the COBRA EDI team 
• Process return files to align errors from the cloud system to the original records 
• Lead the design for an internal app “GateKeeper,” which gave the COBRA EDI Team ability to manage the transfer of received files to the cloud platform 
• Apply checks for specific scenarios that were costly in wasted fees 
• Gain visibility into expected, received and late customer file  

In addition, we provided COBRA EDI KPI reporting to monitor on-going ROI values to help deliver strategic insight for future business decisions, as well as assisting in saving time and money through: 

• No additional hiring of staff for their COBRA team 
• Implemented validation checks to ensure the client is not sending unnecessary information to participants 
• The specific checks for placing files on-hold had saving more in lost fees than the project cost itself within two weeks of the project going live 
• The COBRA EDI team performing more value-add services and no longer manually processing files 
• Eliminating the need of opening files to verify if they’re empty or not