Dr. Peter Mills

Associate Medical Director, Cigna Europe

Cigna’s Chronic Condition Management Programme

Together, all the way

With somewhere between 40 and 50% of adults living with at least one chronic condition it could be argued that health insurance companies should be doing more to help them. This is exactly what we’re doing at Cigna with our Chronic Condition Management Programme.

To be fair it’s not a very catchy name, and we often refer to it with the acronym CCM, but we’re really excited about rolling this out to our customers around the world.

To start with we’re focusing on diabetes and cardiovascular disease, heart disease and high blood pressure, with the aim of providing help and guidance to people living with these conditions.

Managing a chronic condition can be stressful at the best of times, but even more so if you’re living in a foreign country with a different healthcare system to the one you are used to. To assist our insured expats, our experienced nurses will provide them with education, guidance and recommendations to help them manage their condition in an optimal fashion.

Through a series of telephone calls the nurses work with the individual to make sure they fully understand their condition, the medications they may be taking and the important lifestyle changes they can make to improve control and reduce the chances of future complications. It’s like having your own personal health guide and can really help people build confidence and expertise in managing a condition that is likely to be with them for the rest of their lives.

If you think this would be of interest to your employees we’d love for you to communicate out this message to them.

To access the programme please direct employees to the health assessment on the Cigna Envoy site. Individuals don’t need to have a chronic condition to complete the assessment, but those that do have diabetes or cardiovascular disease will be asked whether they would like to be contacted by a nurse. It’s as simple as that and even, and because there is no cost to employer or employee it’s a “win-win”.

Dr. Inge Schrever

Associate Medical Doctor

Meet Cigna's Doctors on the Ground

Over 100 doctors and nurses and over 180 medical consultants worldwide

"We have an intimate knowledge of what's possible in different parts of the world"

Dr. Inge Schrever
Associate Medical Doctor

After ten years of working in humanitarian aid, Dr Inge Schrever joined Cigna to help people working all over the world get access to quality, affordable medical care.

Before I joined Cigna I worked for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). I qualified as a doctor, had a year in an emergency room and then spent ten years abroad working in the humanitarian world. I worked in some very remote regions where you were the only health care option so you knew that whatever you did, you were saving lives.

When I worked in Zimbabwe, I would see people with HIV arrive in wheelbarrows. These were people who had been very sick for years and they would come in and start their HIV treatment and within a few months, these people would be up, walking and talking – you really knew you were making a difference.

With Cigna, we often visit medical providers in different countries. We visit them to see what they’re capable of and how the operation works – you can’t just choose a place because it looks modern or professional. We’ve seen hospitals with very nice, modern buildings but no doctors available. We have a way of assessing providers to help customers get quality care, and better value as well.

We have an intimate knowledge of what’s possible in different parts of the world. For instance, Cigna has hundreds of thousands of covered members working or living in Africa, so knowing the context of every situation is key. We deal with a lot of repatriation and evacuation and we have to know which country you can do what in. Also, on the medical front, if someone is seriously injured and needs an intensive care unit (ICU) but we know a certain country doesn’t have a good one, we have to look at options for helping the customer get out of the country.

We help customers understand their choices for medical providers. We will show customers the options they have in our network and it’s our job to help ensure they don’t pay more than they need to.

Our clinical support staff follow up on our members’ cases. We don’t just assess a case and then leave it to the provider. For instance, if someone has cancer they will have a dedicated case manager (a trained nurse) who will look after that case and always maintain contact with the member. If they can’t talk to the provider, then our case managers are at hand to answer questions and ease worries.

All our clinical support staff speak at least two languages, but the majority speak three.We have many different nationalities covering many different parts of the world. We have nurses based in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America – all over the world.

Linking employers and employees to more

CignaLinks^®, our specialised solution with local healthcare providers to facilitate direct network access, management of costs through network discounts and minimum mandatory benefit cover and access to care in countries where this may be affected by government regulations or tax implications.

At Cigna we are constantly looking to build on our provider network to ensure employees have access to quality healthcare, wherever they are in the world. View the map below to see our partnerships around the world.

Best Healthcare Provider and Mental Health Initiative of the Year nominations

Cigna UK received good news this week that they are finalists for two industry awards – the Corporate Adviser Awards and the Workplace Savings and Benefits Awards (WS&B).

For the Corporate Adviser Awards, taking place on 3^rd July, they are a finalist in the category of Best Healthcare Provider. The award submission focused around Cigna Virtual Health® and the emotional wellbeing pathway caught the attention of the judges.

The emotional wellbeing pathway also helped Cigna UK become a finalist for the Mental Health Initiative of the Year category for the WS&B Awards, taking place 6^th September.

Last year, Cigna UK were also recognised by WS&B, winning the Best Use of Technology for Benefits Award.