New Realities Shape Today’s Environment
In the past, traditional managed care plans shielded employees from the true cost of health care. Therefore, employees never needed to compare or evaluate benefits options or providers. In order to engage consumers in their health care choices, several fundamental changes need to take place:
- When employees face a catastrophic event or a life-threatening illness, they don’t have the time or capacity to think about the cost. However, with more discretionary services, employees should be engaged in making prudent decisions.
- With consumer-driven health care, plan design plays an important role in driving member behavior – our model supports different coverage levels for different services and gives members a clear understanding of the costs.
- Because employees are asked to take more responsibility for their health care decisions, they need help making choices. Our online tools include information such as hospital outcome comparisons, prescription drug costs and alternative treatment options.
- To change employee behavior, they first must be aware of the true costs of health care and believe their efforts can make a difference in keeping costs down. This unique education program, created by Great-West Healthcare, now part of CIGNA, is designed to influence employee behavior through targeted communication tools.
This new consumer-driven approach is essential in today’s health care environment. That’s why we developed our consumer-driven PPO, Great-West Healthcare Consumer AdvantageSM.