Best Practices for Plan Comparison Setup

You need to consider the best practices described in this topic before implementing the plan comparison feature.

Aspect	Best Practice
How many plans of the same type do you have that you want participants to compare?	We recommend that you enable the plan comparison feature only when you have 2 or more plans of the same type to compare.
Do you offer plans in more than 1 country?	You'll need to create templates and plans for all of those countries.
Do you want to use eligibility?	Select an eligibility profile if you want to display only eligible plans during comparison. Even if you don't select an eligibility profile, participants will continue to see comparison plans that apply to the country that's set in the template. If you do select an eligibility profile, participants will see eligible plans, along with the plans of their country. The eligibility profile that you select is evaluated against the primary assignment of a person, as on the date that was set as the quick action parameter. If there’s no quick action date parameter set, it’s evaluated as of today’s date. Remember, the eligibility profile attached to the main plan in the Plan Configuration work area, has no effect on plan comparison.
What plan features do you want to show during comparison?	Study your plans carefully and identify the features that they offer. For example a medical plan may have coinsurance, annual deductible, and prescription drugs as the features. If you identify these features in advance, it will be easy for you to set up the plan comparison.
Do you want to group the features?	Decide if the features should appear as a long list in the comparison or if they should be grouped together. If you group features, participants can expand or hide those groups based on their significance, thus increasing readability. If you set up groups and you have some features left that don't fit into any of the groups, you need to create a generic group to include those features. You can't have a mixture of grouped and ungrouped features.
Do you want to showcase any of the features to your participants?	You need to identify the main features of your plans that you want to show to your participants first. For example, free preventative care or prescription coverage included. You need to enter these in the Highlights section of the setup page. When your participants compare plans, these highlights appear at the top of the comparison.
Do you want to display weekly costs, monthly costs, or annual costs?	We deliver an extensible lookup named Estimated Cost Period (ORA_HRC_COMP_HD_TYPE) with these values: Estimated Weekly Cost Estimated Monthly Cost Estimated Annual Cost If you want to use a different time period, you need to extend the lookup before you start to set up your plans. You can locate this lookup under the Manage Common Lookups task in the Setup and Maintenance work area.
Do your features have some details that need to be categorized further?	You can define categories to group additional details that belong to your feature. For example, in the US these might be network and non-network. You can set them up once so that they're included in all your features.
Do your features contain options that occur across plans?	For example, you may have Employee Only option and Employee Plus Family option for your medical plans. You can set them up once so that you can easily select and include them in all your features. These options aren't associated with the ones that you create in the Plan Configuration work area. They are meant only for plan comparison.
Do you want to display footnotes for any of your plans or features?	If required, you might want to identify the specific plans or features that you want to associate footnotes with. You can provide footnotes when you design plan comparison templates.
Do you want your participants to use 'startsWith' criteria when searching for plans to compare?	When you select plans for comparison, the default search uses the 'contains' criteria. If you want the search to use the 'startsWith' criteria, turn on the profile option Benefits Plan Comparison List of Values Start with Search Enabled.