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Dear Benefits Administrators,
We recognize the challenges you experienced this last year since the launch of Benefits 24/7. Despite significant efforts, we have not yet achieved full system stability. Open enrollment has produced a significant increase in account errors and bugs, resulting in some of our members not being able to access their benefits.
First, we want to acknowledge the extra work you do on your employees’ behalf to notify us timely when issues arise and your patience as we have worked through tickets. Our goal is to ensure that our members have access to their benefits and that will continue to be our top priority.
Second, moving forward, we are committed to sharing weekly updates on Benefits 24/7 issues to ensure transparency and accountability.
To highlight the importance of this work, we’re taking these steps:
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Making organizational changes. The Benefits 24/7 (enrollment system) and PAY1 (eligibility and accounting system) teams will now report directly to the HCA’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) in HCA’s IT division. This reporting change will help us better prioritize issues and accelerate stabilization efforts. HCA is also hiring a new manager dedicated solely to PEBB and SEBB technology systems, reporting directly to the CIO, to oversee system stabilization and increase collaboration between the teams.
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Increasing resources. IT will also hire additional staff and prioritize the stabilization and optimization of Benefits 24/7 over other agency projects. In the meantime, HCA is authorizing overtime for current staff across several divisions to address the workload. Additional IT resources are also being pursued as part of the next state biennial budget processes.
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Increasing operational functionality. The Outreach and Training team now has expanded permissions to make more types of account corrections, reducing some escalation steps to the HCA’s IT division. Several divisions are also developing reports to proactively identify system discrepancies and trends, and researching ways to automate and streamline the resolution of system tickets.
Starting next week, we will deliver weekly updates on the issues that have been reported and share what’s been resolved. We are also creating a space to share updates on the PEBB Benefits Administrators webpage and will announce when that is published in a future weekly update.
We’re working through your HCA Support tickets
Since open enrollment, we have received a large number of HCA Support tickets. Generally, we respond to tickets in the order received, but also look for issues that potentially affect many accounts. In those instances, we do take action earlier.
Please follow these tips to help minimize the number of tickets in the queue and resolve issues more quickly:
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Our ticket backlog contains duplicates, so we request that you do not resend questions/tickets you’ve already submitted. Also, please close out any tickets that have already been resolved or are no longer relevant.
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When submitting a ticket, make sure you include your agency and subagency (or name/code) in the body of your message, with the full Social Security number for the employees affected.
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Please do not refer your employees to contact Outreach and Training for help resolving their account issues.
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Please do not respond with “Thank you” replies. We still have to open these to see if there is additional content for us to address, which takes time away from us addressing your more important issues.
Your collaboration and feedback are vital and have been much appreciated!
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