CIGNA HealthCare Announces Long-Term Agreement With University of Michigan Health Management Research Center
Posted on: Tuesday, 12 December 2006, 12:01 CST
BLOOMFIELD, Conn., Dec. 12, 2006 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CIGNA HealthCare today announced it has entered into a long-term agreement with the University of Michigan, which gives it access to intellectual property developed by Professor D. W. Edington, Ph.D., and the researchers within the University of Michigan Health Management Research Center (UM-HMRC), a unit within the University of Michigan's Division of Kinesiology, that he directs. The agreement includes an exclusive license within the United States for the use of sophisticated analytics that help consumers identify and address health risks and help employers develop worksite health and wellness programs. Under the agreement, CIGNA HealthCare will also license the UM-HMRC health risk assessment questionnaire and have access to additional employer reporting capabilities through UM-HMRC.
The organizations have also entered into an initial and renewable five- year research agreement to jointly collaborate on research related to health and wellness promotion. Expected areas for research collaboration include measuring the impact of health advocacy programs on clinical outcomes and health care costs, and modeling the return on investment of these programs.
The analytic capabilities, and the questionnaire used to gather data, have been developed under the leadership of Dr. Edington, based on his over 30 years of research and experience in health services research. Dr. Edington's teaching, research and consulting focuses on the relationship between behaviorally oriented health risks and their clinical and economic consequences for individuals and organizations. He and his team are specifically focused on how individual health promotion, worksite wellness activities and programs impact health care economics, productivity and human resource development.
Through the affiliation with UM-HMRC and other recent initiatives, such as the expansion of health coaching programs, CIGNA HealthCare is significantly expanding its focus on health and wellness programs and consumer engagement capabilities. These programs are designed to help consumers avoid health care problems and their associated costs and impacts on quality of life.
CIGNA HealthCare President David Cordani said that CIGNA and UM-HMRC share a similar philosophy - to encourage consumer engagement in health care and to encourage the adoption of worksite initiatives to improve health as an effective business strategy.
"We view the health of employees as directly connected to the health of companies," Cordani said. "Through our consumer engagement and outreach initiatives, we positively impact the health and well-being of individuals and further control costs and improve productivity for plan sponsors. This new relationship will enable CIGNA HealthCare to significantly enhance our capabilities in these areas and to lead the industry in understanding and implementing effective strategies to engage consumers in managing their health."
Robin Rasor, Director of Licensing within U-M's Office of Technology Transfer, calls the agreement mutually beneficial. "This is the kind of affiliation we hope for," says Rasor. "Over the years, Dee and his team developed a productive suite of tools, and with CIGNA's capabilities the technology will now reach the public on a large scale."
Under the agreement, CIGNA HealthCare will have exclusive, licensed use within the United States of the UM-HMRC's Trend Management System and Risk Clustering algorithms. From data reported through responses to a health risk assessment questionnaire, the system identifies an individual's risks, assigns strategies and recommendations for the optimal level of services and interventions needed to support risk reduction or risk avoidance, and forecasts costs and health status. Importantly, the system provides methodology to target and prioritize outreach to consumers based on the health risks that are most likely to influence their overall health status and health care utilization in the next one to three years.
"Preventing health care problems before they impact employee productivity and health care costs is the focus of our employee health and wellness programs," said Andrew Scibelli, Manager, Health Management Program, Florida Power & Light Company, a member of the University of Michigan Corporate Consortium and a company that offers CIGNA HealthCare programs to employees. "But these programs can't be successful if employees don't use them. Key to the success of our efforts is having reliable data and a thorough and thoughtful analysis of that data. Both guide us to the right programs and incentives that encourage employee adoption of the health and wellness resources we provide."
CIGNA HealthCare will also gain a non-exclusive license for the UM-HMRC health risk assessment questionnaire, created as a result of over 25 years of development and data analysis. The health risk assessment has been used extensively in research, the results of which have been documented in more than 100 research studies that have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Also as part of the agreement, CIGNA HealthCare will have access to additional reporting capabilities that provide aggregate data to employers to help them understand their workforce population's risk profile and the impact of this profile on current and future health care costs and the prevalence and cost of disability and lost productivity. These reports can assist employers in making decisions about how to best structure their health and wellness programs to meet employee health needs and company productivity goals.
About CIGNA HealthCare
CIGNA HealthCare, headquartered in Bloomfield, CT, provides medical benefits plans, dental coverage, behavioral health coverage, pharmacy benefits and products and services that integrate and analyze information to support consumerism and health advocacy. "CIGNA" or "CIGNA HealthCare" refers to various operating subsidiaries of CIGNA Corporation . Products and services are provided by these operating subsidiaries, and not by CIGNA Corporation.
About the University of Michigan Health Management Research Center
UM-Health Management Research Center (UM-HMRC) is a world-wide leader in studying how health choices influence total health and productivity, quality of life, vitality and health care economics throughout a lifetime.
CIGNA HealthCare
CONTACT: Amy Turkington, CIGNA HealthCare, +1-860-226-3489,amy.turkington@cigna.com; or Mark Maynard, University of Michigan,+1-734-763-0615, mmaynard@umich.edu
Web site: http://www.cigna.com/
Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/165050.html
Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall
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