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When open enrollment ends, that’s the last time most employees will think about their company’s benefits options. They pick a plan, close the laptop, and don’t look at it again until next year’s reminder email.
But more than half of benefits-eligible workers in the U.S. say they regret the selections they made during their last open enrollment. Among Gen Z employees, that number climbs to 78%.¹
These aren’t people who ignored their benefits. Many spent real time weighing their options. The issue is that they didn’t have enough information or support to make sense of their choices.
That’s exactly what benefits decision support is built to address. Done well, it turns a confusing event into a year-round source of clarity. Done poorly, it’s a stressful series of steps that leaves employees feeling even more uncertain about their decisions.
Here’s what goes into a great decision support tool, why it’s important, and what to look for when evaluating a partner for your organization.
Benefits decision support is technology that helps employees choose the right health plans and voluntary insurance based on their specific circumstances.
Employees typically answer a short set of questions about their household, expected medical needs, and financial priorities. The tool then models likely costs across each available plan and recommends the option that fits best.
The category has moved well past the basic medical plan profiling that dominated benefits tech a decade ago. Newer platforms pull in real employee data, such as family size, salary, and prior elections, and increasingly use AI to answer plan-related questions in plain language, at any time of year.
Instead of a one-time nudge during enrollment, the goal is ongoing guidance tied to what’s actually happening in an employee’s life: a new baby, a diagnosis, a move, or a major life change.
The financial stakes of employee benefits confusion keep rising.
Average annual premiums for employer-sponsored family coverage reached $26,993 in 2025, and workers now contribute an average of $6,850 of that themselves.² The average single-coverage deductible has climbed 43% over the past decade, to $1,886.² With numbers like that, choosing the wrong plan is no minor inconvenience. It can cost an employee around $2,000 more in avoidable spending.³
Employees aren’t making these choices carelessly, but many people don’t have the time to sift through lengthy PDF files full of medical terminology and confusing percentages. Left without guidance, roughly 90% of employees re-elect the same plan they had the year before, even if it no longer fits their family’s needs.⁴
The root problem is benefits literacy. A recent study found that 86% of people couldn’t correctly define all four of the most basic cost-sharing terms: deductible, copay, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket maximum.⁵ Employees aren’t given a real education in how their coverage works, so they default to the familiar choice or the cheapest-looking premium and hope for the best.
The clearest evidence comes from watching what happens when employees are actually given personalized recommendations rather than a list of plans to decode on their own. Healthee’s Plan Comparison Tool analyzes each employee’s demographics, dependents, and existing elections, then ranks the available health plans by what’s actually likely to fit their life, with plain-language cost breakdowns.
With that kind of guidance in place, one employer with 4,000 U.S.-based employees saw a $214K reduction in claims because their team made cost-effective decisions during enrollment. They also reported a $262K reduction in both employer and employee premiums. When employees get clear breakdowns specific to their health journey, they’re more likely to feel confident about their choices (and can skip emails to HR or calls to insurance carriers).
The same personalization carries over to voluntary benefits. Employees using our benefits decision support tool selected one or more voluntary benefits at a rate of 71.2% last year, compared with a 49% industry benchmark. These insurance options can be a great way for employees to avoid high costs during sudden hospital stays, major accidents, and other situations.
Based on our team’s experience in the benefits industry, here’s what you’ll find in support tools and platforms that actually improve your employees’ experience.
The tool should model actual costs and medical scenarios for an employee’s specific household and health needs, not generic suggestions that apply to everyone. Look for a platform that references your company’s health plan information and considers dependents, prior claims or elections, and expected care needs. That way, it can share every key difference between plans and how that applies to your employees.
Enrollment is a crucial time for employees to have benefits decision support, but what about the rest of the year? The best platforms are available to guide employees 24/7/365. They tie guidance to real moments: a new dependent, a diagnosis, a change in income, or a new pregnancy. And they can offer proactive outreach and reminders timed to those moments, not just remain on standby for employees to come looking.
Employees can’t make informed decisions when they don’t understand certain terms in the health insurance space. A strong tool defines deductibles, copays, coinsurance, and out-of-pocket maximums in the moment, right where the employee is making the decision, instead of pointing them to a separate glossary or handbook they’ll likely never open.
Although some platforms offer chatbots or other support agents, they’re often full of the same phrases you’d find in a Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBC) document. The best platforms let employees ask questions the way they’d ask a knowledgeable friend, and get answers back in plain English rather than insurance jargon.
A decision support tool that can’t pull accurate data from your HR or benefits administration platform, or write elections back into it, creates more manual work than it saves. Ask vendors directly how implementation works, how long it takes, and whether your team will need to continue transferring data manually between systems after you launch the platform.
A large portion of the U.S. workforce speaks a primary language other than English, and an English-only tool leaves that community without thorough support. Accessibility also means a design that works well on mobile devices, since many employees will do their research, enroll, and find care on their phones.
Given how personal this information is, employees deserve clear answers about who sees their interactions with the support tool and how that data is stored. Ask any vendor for their security certifications and how they ensure your team’s data stays protected and private.
When employees have an easy way to understand their benefits, they’re more likely to make smart, cost-effective decisions. Implementing decision support as a year-round activity, not a two-week enrollment tool, will help your team lower costs, reduce HR’s workload, and empower employees.
Healthee’s platform, including our AI assistant Zoe, is built around exactly this kind of year-round, personalized guidance. If you’re evaluating how decision support fits into your benefits strategy, our team would be glad to show you how our platform works.
1. Equitable. “Equitable Survey Finds Majority of Working Americans Regret Benefits Selections During Open Enrollment.” 2024. https://equitable.com/newsroom/2024/equitable-survey-finds-majority-of-working-americans-regret-benefits-selections-during-open
2. Kaiser Family Foundation. “2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey.” https://www.kff.org/health-costs/2025-employer-health-benefits-survey/
3. LearnLux. “How Does Financial Wellbeing Help Employers Reduce Wasted Benefits Spend?” 2026. https://www.learnlux.com/post/how-does-financial-wellbeing-help-employers-reduce-wasted-benefits-spend
4. Benefit News. “How to Keep Employees From Making the Same Mistakes During Open Enrollment.” 2026. https://www.benefitnews.com/news/how-to-keep-employees-from-making-the-same-mistakes-during-open-enrollment
5. Journal of Health Economics. “86% of people can’t define deductible, copay, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum.” 2025. https://www.airbo.com/blog/86-of-people-cant-define-deductible-copay-coinsurance-and-out-of-pocket-maximum
