Marsh & McLennan, Xevant Tie Up To Ease Employer Assistance

Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.’s (NYSE:MMC) unit Mercer entered into an agreement with Xevant, a market leading company providing pharmacy benefit management (PBM) and performance optimization solutions, to offer employers a unique optimization solution. With this plan, employers will be able to gain access to real-time and feasible insights into the expense and performance of the pharmacy benefit plans.

The solution is driven by the common cost concerns of employers regarding the exorbitantly priced prescription drug plans, especially specialty drugs. 68% of employers view management of cost of specialty drugs as one of the top three health benefit strategies for the coming five years.

The unique combination of Mercer’s pharmacy consulting specialists, actuaries and financial consultants along with Xevant’s X3 real-time analytics ability is expected to provide key analytics to employers through timely insights, extensive data, etc.

Moreover, employers will be able to gain traction from and resolve their challenges by identifying hyper-inflationary medicines, managing pharmacy expenditure in a better fashion and getting in-depth view of certain cost-cutting initiatives, such as formularies, networks and utilization management programs, etc.

Mercer believes that this innovative service will help employers introduce significant changes to their pharmacy benefit offerings as well as foresee future trends.

Marsh & McLennan’s Mercer subsidiary has been consistently coming up with solutions and acquiring units to boost its capabilities. This unit also announced the launch of Mercer Mobility Management Platform (MMP), a cloud-based delivery solution, in collaboration with ServiceNow in May 2019.
Mercer belongs to the Consulting segment of the company, which contributed around 45% to the company's total revenues last year.

Shares of this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company have rallied 20% in a year’s time, underperforming its industry’s growth of 24.6%.

Stocks to Consider

Investors interested in the insurance industry might take a look at some better-ranked stocks like eHealth, Inc. (NASDAQ:EHTH) , Brown & Brown., Inc. (NYSE:BRO) and Radian Group (NYSE:RDN) .

eHealth offers private online health insurance exchange services in the United States and China. It came up with average three-quarter positive surprise of 167.2%. The stock sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

Brown & Brown deals with insurance products and services. The company has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) and managed to deliver positive results in all the trailing four quarters, the average being 9.1%. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Radian Group engages in the mortgage and real estate services business in the United States. The company pulled off a positive surprise of 14.29% in the last reported quarter. It carries a Zacks Rank of 2.

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