Chad Dawson

While traditional health care institutions like hospitals remain the foundation for serious disease and medical care, a paradigm shift is occurring with the potential for the individual to be the “CEO” of their own health, wellness and prevention leveraging digital technology, virtual care services and artificial intelligence to create a customized, data driven, real-time experience. The integration of these innovative solutions will allow each individual to not only understand their complete health picture, but also take the steps to prevent disease, improve wellbeing and proactively catch warning signals before they become larger health problems. Employers are perfectly suited to offer their employees the tools and resources necessary to unlock this potential by evolving their benefits programs from a mainly transactional approach (i.e., paying claims) to one that truly drives health outcomes.

An evidence-based, world class mental health strategy can help employers boost productivity, enhance employee health and wellness and create amazing company culture. A proactive approach to mental health can have many indirect, positive business outcomes such as reducing liability and preventing workplace conflicts. All of this contributes to a clear ROI for businesses of all shapes and sizes. There is a huge opportunity for employers to step up, stand out and show their community what a great place to work looks like. This requires tackling mental health head-on with education, destigmatization and a toolkit of resources tailored to the needs of employees and their families. Those that do will enhance culture while generating some awesome karma for future recruitment and retention.

Compliance is like a good night’s sleep - we all know we need it, feel so much better when it’s consistently on track yet is often the first thing to slip when we get busy, get distracted or simply forget how important it really is. Compliance is the most overlooked aspect of employer sponsored benefits and retirement plans and negligence (or ignorance) brings significant legal, financial, and reputational risk into play. With an increasingly knowledgeable employee population, litigation on the rise, and a pandemic driven disruption in traditional employer/employee relationships, plan administration and compliance are now more important than ever. Compliance should be the number one priority for any employer with a benefits or retirement plan in place. In this session we’ll provide the basics of what you need to know and why, review some case study examples to hammer home the importance and provide practical strategies to mitigate the risk.