Finance Committee — 02/02/2022 Page 2
Re: Software Licensing: Benefits Administration in the amount not to exceed $480,000 funded from 54400 Software
Licensing/Benefits Internal Service Fund (Administrative Services)
MOTION BY ALDERMAN COMEAU TO ACCEPT, PLACE ON FILE AND AWARD A BID TO ALIGHT FOR THE
IMPLEMENTATION OF THE ALIGHT BENEFITS ADMINISTRATION SOLUTION FOR ALL INSURANCE PLANS FOR
THE CITY IN AN AMOUNT NOT TO EXCEED $480,000 ($160,000 A YEAR FOR THREE YEARS). FUNDING
THROUGH DEPARTMENT: 113 BENEFITS; FUND: 54400 SOFTWARE LICENSING/BENEFITS INTERNAL SERVICE
FUND
ON THE QUESTION
Kim Kleiner, Administrative Services Director
Good evening. Kim Kleiner, Administrative Services Director. I’d like to give a little bit of background for those of you that
may not know about our benefits programs. Back on January 5‘ | wrote the Board a memo detailing the health of the
benefits health fund. If any of you didn’t receive it, I’d be glad to resend it. | try to do that once a year just to give you a
flavor of what’s happening and where we are with the fund. As of today, the fund balance is a little over $9 million.
Back when COVID struck, we were faced with a very difficult situation within (inaudible). So historically benefits — and we
manager benefits for all of the city, school, police, fire, city - we were faced with a problem where historically the benefits
had all been paper enrollment. Here we are with COVID and we're struck with the idea of having to get all the paper
enrollments from across the city. Now we are fortunate over at the School Department there is an HR office and they
work in partnership with us to collect all the school enrollments and then bring them all to the city. All of the input is done
here within three staff members. So this past year you had 2,089 enrollments. So they enter all of those enrollments into
our Lawson system, and then into the Anthem system which covers our health, and then into the Delta system which is
Delta Dental. So you can imagine not only is it a totally inefficient process but there’s a lot of room for human error.
When you’re keying that amount of data, it’s natural to happen.
So we knew back then that we wanted to change this and that it needed to be a priority. WBS (Workplace Benefit
Solutions) is our consultant that deals with us on all healthcare matters. They recommended that we go out to an RPF
through them which is commonly what we do for health products and that we look at bids from some of the top leaders.
That’s exactly what we did this fall. So they put out an RFP to all of their health industry leaders and we got three back —
technically four when we kicked back but three that we considered. Alight and Benefit Express being the top two. The
third being kind of disqualified for lack of services.
The top bidder had everything that we wanted. So Alight not only can totally satisfy the city’s needs in terms of their
deliverables but they have an incredible employee education package. So as many of you may know, we have been in
the process of a healthcare redesign. Part of that redesign is moving our employees from what we call our old HMO
250/500 to our new HMO 1500/3000. That takes an incredible amount of education to educate employees on what these
new benefits entail, what benefit package is best for them and their families who need services. This software has that
capability built into it. It will model an employee’s unique situation. They input key data, family size, healthcare situations,
pharmacy needs, and it will walk them through what benefit plan and what their costs could look like throughout the year.
That was very important to us.
The other part of this software that was very important to us is its all automatic feeds. So they will give us ten automatic
feeds to vendors which will stop all of that input and what we’re starting to get back from our vendors like Anthem, and
Delta, and Hartford is that they’re willing to kick in. So after my meeting and | wrote my memo to you, it is $160,000 a
year, a three year deal to start with. Hartford came back and agreed to kick in 20. So that | got after this we are still
working with our other partners to see if they would be willing. Why are they willing? Because the data that they’re going
to get through these automatic feeds is more reliable, and it’s faster, and it allows them to be more efficient on their end.
So that’s basically where we are. | tried to cover in my memo to you all of the features that | thought were beneficial to the
city. So | don’t want to repeat anything but certainly I’m happy to answer any questions.
Mayor Donchess
Before we go further, | didn’t recognize Alderman Thibeault who’s also present although not a member of the committee.
Any questions from anybody?
Alderman Klee
Thank you Mr. Mayor. Director Kleiner do you think the others will kick anything in and if so to what extent? Ordo you
