The healthcare landscape is becoming increasingly competitive due to several factors, including new market entrants, technological advancements, and evolving customer expectations. This competition is forcing established players to adapt new strategies where they can differentiate themselves as a true strategic and consultative partner, through automation, best-in-class reporting packages, advanced analytics, and a strong consultative wrap. For those managing account group reporting, such as health plans and consultants, the right technological infrastructure, analytics, and capabilities can mean the difference between inefficiency and strategic clarity. Traditional reporting methods are often reliant on spreadsheets, siloed systems, and manual processes that can be inefficient, error-prone, and unsustainable in the face of growing complexity and competition. Solutions need to be easy to use, scalable, and repeatable, while also being specific and configurable for a broad audience, so a one size-fits-all approach simply won’t work for varying user needs.
Account group reporting (AGR), sometimes to referred to as employer group reporting, refers to the structured collection and submission of data related to plan performance, cost, and utilization, typically segmented by employer groups, product types, and market segments. This reporting is essential for plan sponsors to understand healthcare spend, assess population health, evaluate plan or program performance, and support strategic decision-making. Consultants and health plans who master AGR can position themselves as trusted advisors by demonstrating value, freeing their staff with automation so they can focus on being more consultative, and giving greater confidence in the insights being delivered. Accurate and timely AGR will delight your clients and strengthen client relationships with some key considerations in mind.
Strategic reporting is about transforming data into meaningful insights that guide decisions and actions. The ideal end state for AGR is a seamless, insightful, and action-driven system that empowers decision-makers at all levels. How do we get there?
Here are our top five considerations:
When deciding whether to build, buy, or combine both approaches for health plan AGR, it comes down to balancing control, cost, and speed. Building a custom solution offers flexibility, but demands significant time, resources, talent, ongoing maintenance, and comes with significant costs. Licensing a third-party tool provides a faster, support-backed option, though it may lack the deep customization some organizations are looking for. A hybrid approach—purchasing a core analytics platform that meets compliance guidelines and can be scaled across many clients and building custom layers around it—can offer a middle ground.
In today’s data-driven world, effective data management and high data quality are not just technical concerns—they’re strategic imperatives. Organizations rely on data to drive decisions, power operations, and create value. But without the right practices in place, data can quickly become a liability instead of an asset. A high-quality back-end data model and data ingestion capabilities can integrate data from multiple sources—claims, enrollment, pharmacy, and provider data—while ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of human error.
We’re living in an era where data comes in more flavors than ever before: disability and workers comp. data; HRA and biometrics; ever expanding point solution and program data; sensor data from wellness IoT devices; geospatial coordinates surfacing social vulnerabilities—the list keeps growing. This explosion of diverse data types is reshaping how organizations operate and compete. It’s unlocking powerful insights but also creating new challenges for storage, integration, and analysis. The flexibility of your data model to ingest and accommodate new data sources will drive new insights, differentiate your offerings, and open new consulting opportunities for large accounts.
Today’s customers expect personalized experiences that reflect their unique needs, preferences, and goals. A generic, one-size-fits-all approach assumes all users fit the same mold—when in reality, their industries, demographics, size, product type, programs and expectations vary widely. For example, very small groups may just need a three-page static dashboard with pre-determined KPIs, where larger accounts need a full, interactive reporting package with drill-down capabilities.
Platforms that streamline employer group reporting reduce the administrative burden and free up resources allowing analysts and consultants to focus on value-add and business objectives gained from AGR insights. Since performance can vary based on parameters like geography and population, useful AGR solutions will have filtering capabilities, time-period flexibility, and the ability to customize reports, packages, and visualizations including customized branding, ensuring timely submissions to employer or market segment clients.
With automation at the core, today’s analytics platforms empower consultants and health plans to quickly surface key insights such as cost drivers, longitudinal trends, population-normalized comparisons, and benchmark group performance. Advanced analytic models and methods are paramount to surface insights – clinical and event-based groupers; clinical rules and gaps in care; classification models and cost guidelines; robust benchmark comparison; and case-mix adjustment.
Technology is not just a tool—it’s a strategic enabler. Invest in modern, scalable reporting platforms that support automation, interactive dashboards, and configurable advanced analytics. By adopting these tools, consultants and payers can increase efficiency, deliver clearer insights, and strengthen their value proposition—positioning themselves as indispensable strategic partners in a fast-changing healthcare landscape.