Payer Puts Healthcare at a Patient's Fingertips

Cigna has introduced a mobile feature that it hopes will lead consumers to raise their rates of engagement with their healthcare providers.

Like a stubborn virus, the necessity for logins and passwords clings to us all. But advances in mobile phone technology and the initiatives of healthcare payers are making headway.

Last month, Cigna became the latest payer to add authentication via fingerprint to its patient-facing mobile app. Now the MyCigna app can take advantage of the same biometric technology that banking apps, Dropbox, Amazon, and others have enabled through mobile platforms such as Apple's Touch ID.

With more than 30 million members in the U.S. alone, Cigna's goal was to decrease the number of those members who don't follow through on steps to seek preventative care, says Stephen Cassell, Cigna's global branding officer at the company's Bloomfield, CT headquarters.

Easier Responses, Lives Saved
"We see consumers go to their computers or phones to log in, but people just fall off. They just don't complete all the steps," says Cassell. "We thought, how could we make things even easier for our customers?"

Cigna was also looking for a way to allow consumers to easily respond to the different calls to action that the insurer was putting out there in the marketplace to get them to engage in their health.

"The reason we even started the fingerprint access is connected to a larger campaign to drive people to try to get their checkups. It's all around how do we help save a hundred thousand lives in the U.S. per year by getting people in for their preventive care services."

A consumer could be in a doctor's office, requesting a referral to a specialist, and would want to know on the spot, whether the specialist is in the Cigna network. By checking MyCigna, he could avoid any surprise out-of-network costs, or a delay in care by having to request a new referral later.

It also lets consumers receive care or provide proof of insurance even if they forget their Cigna ID cards, Cassell says.

Such convenience may vary depending upon provider, as some providers have a way to capture the member's ID via the Cigna app, but some do not. "Obviously we're looking to make things more efficient for the medical community as well," he says.

Provider Directory Accuracy Remains an Issue
I asked Cigna about a recent New York Times article highlighting the continuing inaccuracy of health insurance provider directories. The company replied that Cigna updates the myCigna directory every night to ensure the most up-to-date information is available to its customers.

The results from multiple focus groups convinced Cigna leaders that the public would respond well to fingerprint access. But the insurer lacks data on its actual use.

That's because of the way fingerprint access is implemented on mobile platforms.

"The feedback in the groups was just really positive," he says. "So we knew that we were on the right path. We are seeing definitely an uptick in overall engagement on preventive care, even from before the MyCigna app came out, and we continue to see those upticks."

Other Payers Also Use Biomterics
Cigna is also thinking about adding some contextual prompts to the app based on what members are searching for while using the app, Cassell says. For example, if the app determines that the user is searching for an urgent care clinic, it could prompt the user to input his fingerprint, and then, with location services enabled, direct them to the nearest urgent care clinic.

Cigna is hardly the first payer to enable features such as Apple's TouchID.

In early 2015, Aetna implemented it in its iTriage app. Apps such as MyCigna and iTriage are not as ambitious as apps from vendors such as LifeMedID, which help providers and payers go further to enable higher Level of Assurance (LOA) services, such as record matching and patient payment via mobile phone at check-in.

Nevertheless, MyCigna is a step forward, and as someone who uses TouchID to reduce my own dependence on logins and passwords, I can vouch for the technology's versatility, one that should be applied to healthcare as rapidly as education allows.