Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System

With 5,000-plus employees, SRHS needed a streamlined system for online benefit enrollment and communication that wouldn’t further tax its HR or IT staff. The HR director at the time of the search had a background in programming and understood the intricacies of developing a custom system versus customizing one of the out-of-the-box products offered by the larger consulting firms.

SRHS had very specific needs, and they quickly realized that an out-of-the-box solution would be impractical. In addition, they found the willingness of the larger companies to customize a benefits administration system for their needs to be nonexistent or extremely expensive.

A Kanawha representative put SRHS in touch with Empowered Benefits, and the HR team found a solution that fit their needs — and their budget.

Empowered Benefits developed online benefit enrollment and communication solution for SRHS that has evolved over time along with the needs of the hospital system’s HR department.

“Basically, Empowered Benefits started with their solution, then sat down with us, and we together designed the specific solution for SRHS,” says Jan Cox, Benefits Manager at SRHS. “From there, we began working with Empowered Benefits in the manner that’s carried forward ever since: we define the requirements, they create and test solutions, and we together implement them. It’s a very efficient working relationship.”

“We judge the savings in working with Empowered Benefits against what it would have cost us to develop a solution in-house, from scratch, with our own programmers,” notes Cox. “In the past, we’ve developed custom solutions for a couple products, so we know what it costs in terms of time, salaries and effort.”