High-tech, high-touch: how an e-benefits solution can help you cut your health-care costs.

With today's ever-increasing demands on the workplace, employers and employees alike are searching for a more efficient way of administering and choosing health-care benefits.

As a result, there is a rapidly growing business-to-employee e-commerce industry called "e-benefits." Offered through an application service provider model, employer-centric Websites are customized to enable employees to make informed choices about their health plans and other benefit options.

The goal is to deliver e-benefit solutions that are high-tech and high-touch--so intuitive and personalized that consumers feel connected, confident and in control.

What is unique about making benefits available via the Web is that it delivers a tailored, one-stop benefits shopping experience. After employees enter their profiles and preferences, this application helps them evaluate all the options, make the best choice, enroll online, locate doctors and hospitals, link with wellness programs, assess individual health risks and find the information they need to keep making healthy choices. Best of all, employees can access this information from the privacy of their workstation or from home, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Over the next three years, the e-benefits market sector is expected to grow to more than $38 billion. An e-benefits solution can provide employers with a way to build a productive, healthy workforce that is more satisfied and better matched with their benefit choices while reducing costs associated with benefits administration.

With double-digit increases in health insurance premiums every year, employers are looking at every possible way to eliminate waste, reduce paperwork and cut benefit administration costs.

E-benefit solutions are estimated to save an employer more than $200 per employee per year by providing employees with accurate, up-to-date benefit information at the click of a mouse. Even more money can be saved when decision-support tools, online enrollment and other functions are added. Considering the value of increased employee satisfaction, retention and productivity, it no longer becomes a matter of if an employer will provide an e-benefits solution, but when.

During the 1990s, many employers phased out traditional pension plans and started 401(k) retirement benefit plans, shifting the responsibility for choosing and managing these plans to employees, who began using the Internet to help make investment decisions.

At a time when employees are facing higher co-payments and higher payroll deductions, employers are considering moving toward defined health-care benefit plans and cost sharing. Employees may eventually have to decide for themselves how and where to spend their health-care dollars. Internet-based e-benefit solutions will be of tremendous help to employees who want to save time and money.

E-benefit providers give the power of choice, through information technology, to transform and democratize the way employee benefits are offered, and we're only beginning to see the positive impact this will have on the workplace.

The bottom line for an employer is that an e-benefits solution improves the value of its workforce by addressing benefit delivery cost and the health needs and risks of their employee population.

Four trends that are driving the growth of the burgeoning e-benefits industry:

* Rising healthcare costs.

* Employers shifting more benefit responsibility to employees.

* Increasing consumer demand for choice in products and services.

* The emergence of self directed health plans and defined contributions.

A. David Vinson is CEO and founder of Optate Inc., an Ann Arbor-based e-benefits solutions provider.