Startup optimizes corporate health care plans
For employers, selecting health care plans and benefits that adequately cover employees, within a budget, is a complex game of trade-offs. Considerations include whether to offer higher premiums for lower deductibles, whether to add preventive-care programs, and how to best cover various drugs and treatments. Now MIT spinout Benefits Science Technologies (BST) has developed software that analyzes data from employee health-insurance claims to predict emerging health risks in that group, and designs new, optimal health care plans for employers. “The benefit is, the overall cost goes down and quality is higher,” says BST co-founder and chief scientist Dimitris Bertsimas, the Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-director of the MIT Operations Research Center. Optimizing health care plans becomes increasingly important, Bertsimas says, as monthly health care premiums and deductibles continue to rise, for employees and employers alike. According to a 2015 report by the Kaiser...