CIGNA Redesigns Member Web Site

In an effort to improve access to the information that customers want most, CIGNA has launched a complete redesign of its member Web site, featuring reworked navigation.

CIGNA Healthcare (Bloomfield, Conn.), the primary business of Philadelphia-based CIGNA ($16.54 billion in 2006 revenue), has been adding new capabilities to its member site, myCIGNA.com, on a quarterly basis since its initial launch in 2002, according to Joseph Mondy, assistant VP of technology communications, CIGNA HealthCare. From the site, members can access personal health information, check claims statuses, look up quality and cost information and perform key tasks, such as downloading forms and requesting ID cards.

"We've been stacking capabilities on top of capabilities," Mondy says. The redesign, which sees around 60,000 visitors a day, unstacked many of those vertical capabilities and reorganized them horizontally, providing more related information within single Web page views, reducing the number of clicks required of customers before they find all the information they want.

Having identified the site's provider directory -- where users can look up, choose and change their primary care provider or locate a specialist -- as its most-used function, CIGNA incorporated into the directory a tool that pools internal and external data from federal, state and other sources such as the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) to power cost and quality ratings.

"Since we know the main stream of traffic is going through that provider directory, we deliberately linked cost and quality information to it, so that it would be easier for people to find at the moment that they'd need it," Mondy explains.

CIGNA will measure success of the redesign by a variety of methods, including pop-up surveys, from which the insurer will glean user feedback on a daily basis. CIGNA will also track increased use of the site for provider information and claim status inquiries, which would otherwise be made through call center contact - which costs about $2 per call answered.

"There's good reason for us wanting to drive people to the site to be able to do that sort of self service," Mondy says. "[It takes] costs out of our healthcare administration, number one, and number two, it also frees up [service center] resources to deal with different types of issues."

CIGNA used IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) WebSphere during the redesign and worked with Razorfish-Avenue A (New York) to ensure fluidity of design across its various Web portals. In-house IT workers did a "lion's share" of the day-to-day redesign work, Mondy says. CIGNA relaunched its public Web site in January.