CIGNA Site Gives The Public More

Leveraging a decade of insight into user interaction and aiming at cross-industry usability standards, Philadelphia-based CIGNA has revamped its public Web site, CIGNA.com. The 16-month development effort added information and tools within an improved navigational approach, designed to let the public at large get a taste of the information and functionality that CIGNA plan members enjoy.

"Our research shows consumers are looking for basic things when they come to our sites initially, so the intent is to bring that to the forefront so they don't have to search, and then give them capabilities to do deep dives where they need to," says Jeffrey Wyne, vice president of marketing, CIGNA HealthCare.

Among the improvements to the existing site, according to CIGNA, were the addition of in-depth articles about managing chronic conditions, maintaining good health and handling unexpected health events; inclusion of information for healthcare financial planning; and the provision of interactive tools to help estimate health risk factors, identify action steps to improve health, and calculate health savings account and flexible spending account contributions.

A multidisciplinary team of approximately 40 professionals, including experts in marketing, medical/clinical, dental and other areas of CIGNA's business areas, worked with Seattle-based Avenue A | Razorfish on the site design.

"They gave us the design template from which we then executed the majority of what we have today," Wyne relates. "Internal designers took that concept and then made it work for CIGNA and the content we are trying to develop."

An additional 15 to 20 IT professionals developed the site. One of the principal technical innovations, according to Wyne, was shifting from HTML format to XML in order to facilitate the sharing of information from sources such as standard medical information provider HealthWise to the general public.

Work on CIGNA's public site has paved the way for the enhancements to company's member personal Web portal www.myCIGNA.com, which will launch new functionality in two phases during the first quarter of 2007. Later in the year, the insurer will relaunch its healthcare professional portal, www.CIGNAforHCP.com.

"CIGNA.com is sort of the umbrella from a user standpoint and overall design standpoint, and the remainder of the portals will follow suit," Wyne says. He adds that the internal portal sites will be re-platformed from their existing Yahoo portal technology to IBM's WebSphere.

CIGNA's strategy in developing better Web sites than its competitors was to ignore them, in effect, and concentrate on examples of excellent service in financial service and other service-focused industries. "When we started to develop the overall online vision that we will begin to realize over the next couple of years it certainly wasn't with the thought of, 'Gosh, how do we surpass this or that competitor," Wyne says. "Our goal was to be at the forefront from a service standpoint, as a service company, and we figured that that will place us well ahead of our competitors."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio