PBN Leaders & Achievers 2024 Awards
Kate Kennedy | USI Insurance Services LLC | Senior vice president of employee benefits
TWO WORDS best describe the work of Kate Kennedy, senior vice president of employee benefits at USI Insurance Services LLC in East Greenwich: mission driven.
Harnessing Financial Data for Strategic Decisions in Healthcare
Financial data has immense value. It can tell you the true history of your healthcare…
Learn More
“I feel like the role that I play on behalf of my clients is to use their own claims data and our analytics and innovative financing solutions to be their advisor, to work in their corner and to negotiate effectively with the medical carriers to prevent the increase in costs,” Kennedy said.
Her accomplishments at USI include directly sourcing and securing new client relationships resulting in $4 million in net new revenue for the company. She also facilitated multi-year benefits strategy development for a national branded beverage company, modernizing benefit offerings while identifying $175,000 in year-one savings.
Additionally, Kennedy led medical plan renewal negotiations for five years, resulting in lower rates on the plans.
Kennedy, who has a personal passion for health and wellness and preventive care, guided wellness strategy and programming for 22,000 employees at the life insurance company, including 300-plus biometric screenings, incentive management, health coaching and tobacco cessation that led to a 25% quit rate among staffers (compared with a 6% national quit rate average) .
She is also responsible for leading the marketing of a retiree medical exchange platform, saving clients more than $750,000 annually and helping them exit liability decades earlier.
Moreover, Kennedy led the transition of three lower, middle-market employers from fully insured to a self-funded platform in a proprietary consortium, providing claim transparency, rate control and plan design flexibility.
“I spend a lot of my time working with my clients in helping them move their wellness strategy forward,” Kennedy said, “to keep their employees healthy and make sure that their employees are focused on preventive care so that they are staying healthy and they are happier but also containing health care costs along the way.”
Kennedy says the key to success is focusing on investing in building long-term relationships, which she says she has been fortunate to build across the state for more than two decades.
