Health Advocacy

The Future of Health Management
(Part 1 in a series)

Health management services continue to play a critical role in helping American businesses and governments manage medical costs, enhance employee productivity and improve the quality of health care. The health management services industry is expanding beyond its traditional focus on case and utilization management and core disease-specific programs to incorporate a broader, more comprehensive “whole patient” view of health care, creating new and earlier opportunities to help employees improve their health.  

At CIGNA, our health advocacy efforts are aimed at achieving a primary goal: to continually reduce the burden of illness, injury and disability and improve the health and functioning of the people we serve.

Since 1997, CIGNA has been actively integrating medical, pharmacy and behavioral data to enable industry-leading disease and case management programs. Nearly a decade later, we continue to drive innovations in integrated “whole patient” health advocacy through an extensive and growing Health Advocacy portfolio backed by broad clinical expertise in coordinating medical, behavioral, pharmacy, disability and dental care.

Our extensive experience using actionable information in clinical program design, implementation, operations, medical management and measurement enables continued innovations not only in traditional case and utilization management and disease-specific programs, but in new programs and services that reach an ever-wider segment of employees. 

Soon we will share details on exciting new initiatives designed to further enhance our sophisticated predictive modeling and early-risk identification capabilities, providing more opportunities to help identify and impact potential gaps in evidence-based care.  And you will hear more about our expanding health coaching programs that support our commitment to enabling greater consumer engagement in health care.   

We recognize that many of our competitors and some of our vendor organizations are making rapid investments in Health Advocacy to follow our lead and integrate the multiple components of health management services to help improve health and productivity and lower costs. One of these organizations, Healthways, recently announced a new health management initiative that follows the “whole patient” strategy and use of actionable information that we’ve been driving in the marketplace – a clear indication of their understanding and commitment to continued innovation.    

We are proud of our record of accomplishment and pleased to be taking a leadership role in the evolving health services arena. We welcome the opportunity to share more information with you about our existing programs and new initiatives.  Look for upcoming articles in future issues of the BIG Picture.