SALT LAKE CITY—Utah-headquartered Opticare Vision Services, formerly Opticare of Utah, has announced that it has completed its integration with benefits and HR platform category leader Employee Navigator, marking “yet another achievement in its commitment to improving the broker and member experience.” The completed integration follows “a busy few years” for Opticare Vision Services, which has included a full-scale rebrand and the launch of an entirely new suite of products and services,” according to an announcement from Opticare Vision Services.

The new suite of services includes broker web-tools, ROI calculator, real-time quoting engine, mobile eyecare platform, the MyOpticare member app and telemed services.

“We are continually looking for ways to make Opticare Vision Services easier to do business with,” Aundrea Brinkman, chief operations officer of Opticare Vision, said in the announcement. “And the services that Employee Navigator provides to our broker partners is robust and industry leading.”

Employee Navigator is a technology platform designed for brokers to easily manage benefit administration, new hire onboarding and enrollment, ACA compliance reporting and carrier integrations, all designed to help brokers and agencies manage benefits for employers of all size. Employee Navigator, based in Bethesda, Md., boasts a client list of over 50,000 employers and 10 million employees, and has a growing list of partner carriers that comprise the Employee Navigator Marketplace.

Aaron Schubach, CEO of Opticare Vision, said, “Not only has our existing client data been converted on to the Employee Navigator platform for administration and renewal, but brokers can now access our line of best in class vision plans on the Marketplace with ease and preferential pricing. We’re excited about the efficiencies that this EDI platform provides and look forward to helping our broker partners provide the very best vision product at the best price, now easier than ever.”

Employee Navigator’s EDI interface gives brokers and carriers a near fool proof way to, in a HIPAA secure environment, send 834 enrollment data directly into the carrier’s formatted database, and in Opticare’s case, a robust machine-learning artificial intelligence environment that is virtually error proof, according to the announcement.

“For a relatively small regional vision plan carrier, our tech-stack rivals anything the large vision plans have in place. Our database environment interfaces with Employee Navigator in an environment that utilizes Microsoft Power BI for real time utilization data, trend reports, sales data, demographic data a much more,” Schubach added. “Our systemic and ocular medical disease reporting tool allows us to directly and in real time, see the correlation between vision plans and the overall health of our members.

"We know that in the course of a routine eye exam our providers can diagnose and treat diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, nephritis, neurological disorders such as MS or migraine treatment as well as early on-set autoimmune disease diagnoses like lupus.

“The data is conclusive that people who have vision plans and are seeing an optometrist every year are healthier, ocular-wise and systemically, than those that don’t have a vision plan. As long as we have the current health care model that we have, whereby people see the doctor only after they’ve become sick, access to affordable primary health coverage like a vision plan is a critical piece to early detection of ocular and non-ocular health concerns,” he said.

Schubach also operates an industry top 50 eyecare provider, Standard Optical, in Utah. “These medical findings, for the most part, are incurable diseases that are manageable with early detection. Our clients have access to in incredible amount of usable, real-time data that we can provide as a part of a comprehensive benefits package,” he said.