Elevate Your Benefits Management with ANSI 834 v2 Template
In the fast-paced world of benefits management, staying ahead of the curve is essential. This post spotlights the ANSI 834 v2 template, an advanced solution designed by Workday that improves upon prior ANSI file templates. Designed to better handle the nuances of 834 vendor file idiosyncrasies, this template was delivered in June 2023, ensuring better compliance with vendors and fewer data errors.
Redefining Configurability
The ANSI 834 v2 template represents a significant advancement in benefits integration technology. Unlike the ANSI V1, this template empowers users to tailor their integration by selecting which employee and dependent data elements to include in the output. This level of customization ensures that each integration is better suited to the unique requirements of the organization, reducing the occurrence of errors and workarounds required.
Population Eligibility: A Game-Changing Feature
One of the standout features of the ANSI 834 v2 template is its ability to handle population eligibility, a significant improvement over the V1, which focused exclusively on benefit plan enrollments. This expanded functionality opens up new possibilities for benefits management, enabling organizations to more accurately determine eligibility criteria and efficiently manage benefit configurations. In a recent configuration for a client, we encountered a requirement to populate an FSA flag for all employees who were enrolled in an FSA Medical plan that was administered by a different vendor. There were several employees enrolled in the FSA plan but not enrolled in the specified Medical plan. Using the Population Eligibility feature in the ANSI 834 V2 Template, we were able to limit the population to only include the FSA flag if the employee was also enrolled in the specified Medical plan.
Addressing Common Challenges
Challenges are common in benefits integrations, but the ANSI 834 v2 template is adept at addressing them. For instance, V1 often struggled to accommodate changes to an employee’s location, company, or address, because these changes usually resulted in plan structure changes with the vendor. Although the V1 had field overrides for the new account codes to be sent, the coverage begin dates did not align to the account structure changes and were only solvable using a post-processor. The new ANSI V2 solves for this by allowing the Coverage Begin Date to be overridden both at the employee and dependent level.
Improved Efficiency
The ANSI 834 v2 template leverages Workday’s Data Initialization Service (DIS) framework, enhancing efficiency. Its improved performance is attributed partly to the absence of an enrollment file generation, making it particularly beneficial for clients managing long-running ANSI integrations.
If you’re facing challenges with your current 834 Medical benefits integration file or are just interested in learning more about this template, we’re here to help. Our team of experts is ready to assist you in implementing the ANSI 834 v2 template and resolving longstanding problems you may have had with prior ANSI 834 templates. With our support, you can harness the full power of this innovative solution and reduce the burden on your benefits partners. Contact us today!
