Plan sponsors have far more access to benefits utilization and organizational health data than in recent years, but challenges persist with fragmentation and consistency across providers, as well as as difficulty turning data into action, according to a panel discussion at Benefits Canada’s 2025 Healthy Outcomes Conference.
“We have 12 sources of data [from external vendors], so many coming in a different format,” said Emmanuelle Gaudette (pictured right), senior leader for organizational health at Pratt & Whitney Canada.
The organization uses 90 indicators to guide its well-being approach, including utilization numbers for mental health, drugs, paramedical benefits and short-term disability; wellness program participation and satisfaction rates; and indications of behaviour change from all of these programs. It also has a “health profile” for all of its office locations.
Read: Pratt & Whitney Canada’s winning well-being program centres around four pillars of health
Also speaking on the panel, Merlyn Sequeira (pictured left), senior director of total rewards at Samsung Electronics Canada, said she uses data “extensively,” including benefits utilization data, employee survey responses and data on denied claims. However, she also said she feels stymied by inconsistency issues across data sources, which make it difficult to “tell a story of where we are compared to the top disease classes in Canada, as an example.”
While the influx of data has been valuable in giving organizations a good foundation to establish trends, noted Emilie Inakazu (pictured centre), director of benefits and well-being at KPMG in Canada, “we still haven’t seen that evolution in the conversation to say, ‘What are we doing with this? What action does this data really drive?’”
KPMG in Canada has been trying to identify trends in its data that can be connected back to particular groups, such as employees who are close to hitting the maximum for a certain benefit, and then target those groups with relevant communications. Inakazu said the organization boosted its mental-health benefit in 2024 in response to seeing how many employees were getting close to hitting the maximum for coverage.
Read: How KPMG Canada flexed its benefits program with a plan redesign
As the industry starts to shift towards a proactive approach to well-being, she said she wants to see the way plan sponsors receive and use data “catch up” and enable them to measure the health outcomes of benefits and wellness investments and connect them to workforce productivity. “It’s a very difficult conversation when you go into meetings with leadership teams to try to convince them to make an investment; it’s very hard to quantify the return because you can’t benchmark those pieces.”
Similarly, both Gaudette and Sequeira said they wanted to see more predictive analytics. “We have all this data; what’s next?” said Sequeira. “What’s going to be the future trend of our workforce, where is the spending going to be? That type of predictive [data] is completely missing.”
Read more coverage of the 2025 Healthy Outcomes Conference.