What is Open Enrollment?

July 1, 2020

Open Enrollment Period is the only time during the year that employees can enroll or change benefits without a qualifying event. Open enrollment occurs on a yearly basis, generally the same time of year, and will have a specified deadline that your company chooses. During this time, your employees can enroll on insurance plans, or make changes to their current plan. For true open enrollment, we don’t apply any late entrant penalties where many other carriers do.

As a reminder, any elections or changes need to be submitted by the last day of open enrollment. From there, these submissions will be in place by your company’s next effective date. ID cards will be sent approximately 7 – 10 days from the time we process enrollment information.

 

If an individual chooses not to enroll, they can wait until next year’s open enrollment or they may enroll within 30 days of a qualifying event. A qualifying event can be marriage, divorce or legal separation, birth of a child or adoption of a child, loss of employment, new employment, loss of other coverage or gaining coverage, or death of insured.

 

To enroll, we have four different enrollment options. Choose which one works best for you and we will work alongside you to get employees signed up.

  1. Manual enrollment (paper enrollment form)
  2. Electronic EDI Enrollment (submitting an 834 HIPPA compliant file for upload)
  3. Web Portal Administration (initial 834 file upload, manual group administration via portal)
  4. Spreadsheet Enrollment (excel spreadsheet, emailed)

For more information, feel free to contact your Dental Select representative or shoot us a message here.