"The Big Picture" Newsletter

October 2009 Issue

CIGNA Pharmacy Management® Continues to be a Key Component of CIGNA’s Strategic Direction

Services help improve the health of our individual customers while reducing costs

At CIGNA, we are committed to an integrated pharmacy and medical model that helps to dramatically improve the health of the people we serve.  Through the coordinated use of prescription drugs, medical disease management and behavioral coaching, we have the power to lower overall medical costs significantly for those clients who have both medical and pharmacy benefits.

Our data from 2008 shows we are:

• Helping our customers avoid 262 heart attacks annually, thereby saving $6.6 million in overall medical costs for individuals in our cholesterol medication adherence program.

• Helping our customers with asthma significantly reduce emergency room visits and hospitalizations due to their asthma, simply by encouraging them to take their medications appropriately.  This has resulted in a 50% reduction in medical costs.

• Helping more of our customers with diabetes reach their blood sugar levels, reducing hospitalizations by 18%, emergency room visits by 13%, and resulting in a 24% reduction in overall medical costs.

• Helping customers in our narcotic therapy management and complex psychiatric case management programs avoid the need for emergency room visits, outpatient costs and hospitalizations, while realizing savings of $2,200 to $2,750 per individual in the programs.  Total medical cost savings for employers offering the program was $27.1 million.

And these are just a few examples.  Our Outcome Improvement programs, which encourage customers to take their medications appropriately to achieve better health, demonstrate that millions of dollars in medical costs can be avoided by adhering to evidence-based medicine and the appropriate use of prescription medications.

While speculation about the future configuration of CIGNA's pharmacy delivery approach has been on some people’s minds – in part fuelled by competitive actions in this space – we are pleased to confirm that CIGNA Pharmacy Management continues to be a key component of CIGNA’s strategic direction. We look forward to providing services to help improve the health of our individual customers in the future, while reducing costs for them and our employer clients.

<< October 2009 Big Picture newsletter