As expected, employee health plan costs are likely to rise again, even if only marginally, by an estimated 4.1 percent in 2019, according to new research by the Mercer National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans. The rise is actually slightly less than that of 2018, which has grown by as much as 4.2 percent.

Mercer says the rise this year has fallen significantly from highs of 6.5 percent in years' past. While past years' increases have been substantial, the rises in premiums also were accompanied by common employer cost-control tactics that have included raising deductibles and employers offering less generous plans.

Thus, while health benefit plans rose, the actual benefits dropped; consumers received less for more, in other words. For the coming year, 2019, however, Mercer reports that less than half of the responding employers (44 percent) said they will be making these types of changes to their plans.

But many employers are adopting new technology solutions to address the root causes of the high cost of healthcare without cutting benefits or increasing the financial burden on employees, Mercer reported in a statement.

"The improvement in the underlying medical plan trend is encouraging because those savings are not solely coming from shifting cost to employees," said Tracy Watts, senior partner and Mercer’s leader for health reform. "It suggests that there is a ‘quiet revolution’ going on in organizations as they deploy more innovative health benefit strategies — and that these have started to pay off."

Mercer identified three technology strategies key to driving higher-value care:

Target specific health problems. More than half of midsize and large employers with 500 or more employees (58 percent) now offer one or more "point solutions" — high-tech, high-touch programs designed to help members with specific health issues. Success is measured in quality of life improvement and fewer trips to the emergency room, the insurer said.

Make it easy to engage. Today, 18 percent of midsized and large employers make all or most of their benefit offerings accessible to employees on a single, fully integrated platform. Another 19 percent say they are working toward full integration. An integrated platform helps employees more easily engage with health and well-being vendors and find the resources they need.

Mine health plan and employee data for actionable insights. Most employers with 500 or more employees (77 percent) already use a data warehouse or get the data they need from plan vendors to inform their health plan strategy, but some of these employers (16 percent) are further ahead, using predictive analytics to identify future opportunities to improve health plan performance — or even health outcomes.

So, what's slowing the trend and bending the cost curve for employers?

Mercer said that "point solutions" large employers have started providing for their employees. For example, one company saw high maternity costs and found users of infertility services had a much higher rate of high-cost newborn claims, including multiple births, pre-term births and "avoidable C-sections."

But by working with a specialty vendor working on infertility issues who was focused on outcomes and reducing costs, they were able to reduce multi-birth pregnancies among employees to less than 3 percent of users of infertility services versus a national average of 22 percent.

One thing to keep in mind: Mercer's findings may change as the preliminary calculations here are just estimates and the data still need to be weighted for national averages. Full results are expected later this year.