Health insurer CIGNA has teamed up with Yahoo! to provide online benefit information to its members.
CIGNA and Yahoo! Enterprise Solutions on Wednesday announced a multi-year agreement to provide health care information on the personalized My Yahoo! portal. The personalized website capability should be available to most of CIGNA HealthCare’s 14.3 million members by the end of 2002.
Once fully rolled out, the program will allow members to review medical claims, update personal information, locate, select or change health care providers, order CIGNA HealthCare ID cards and order medications online. Members will also have access to CIGNA’s Tel-Drug online pharmacy offering information, drug refill reminders, and home delivery of prescription drugs.
Pharmaceutical companies should regard the deal as a positive step towards making the ordering of prescription drugs more efficient. Coupled with the addition of tools to remind users to refill prescriptions, this should increase treatment compliance and the number of prescriptions refilled.
By partnering with Yahoo!, CIGNA does not have to build the personalization technology. The individualized websites will be generated using personalization tools from Yahoo!’s business communications and corporate portal division, Yahoo! Enterprise Solutions.
This new partnership is an example of the growing emphasis on personalized website portals that include information and services from email and news feeds to medical compliance tools, all on one customizable homepage. This partnership demonstrates that Yahoo! is acknowledging the demand for health information to be brought online to satisfy the consumer needs.
