After buying MDLive, Cigna will launch its own virtual-first health plan

Startups and insurers alike are leaping on to the virtual principal care bandwagon, with the notion of routing sufferers to digital visits to cut down costs and create up a rapport with a principal treatment physician.

Cigna is the latest insurance provider to join the development, saying on Tuesday that it plans to supply a digital-first well being strategy to find employers. It ideas to pilot the idea with big, self-insured corporations, prior to extending it to scaled-down clientele and completely-insured enterprises.

The plan would feature digital visits with MDLive’s major treatment companies for no copay, as properly as help managing long-term problems and care navigation.

Competition UnitedHealthcare and Aetna have declared designs to roll  out their individual renditions of virtual most important care plans. They also are dropping copays to steer clients to virtual visits with medical doctor tactics that they very own. Even so, the designs differ a little: While UnitedHealthcare will need a referral to see a specialist in-individual, Cigna’s and Aetna’s virtual major treatment plans do not.

A broader wager on telehealth
For the rest of its employer-sponsored strategies, Cigna will provide telehealth visits by means of MDLive for schedule treatment, prescription refills and observe-up visits, starting in January. It will also offer digital visits with a skin doctor to persons who accessibility treatment by means of their employer or an ACA prepare.

“Not only will this give extra persons an extra entry point to the healthcare method, but individuals will be equipped to develop lasting interactions with their desired MDLive provider just as they would in a classic office environment setting,” Cigna’s senior vice president of answers, Heather Dlugolenski, mentioned in a news release. “MDLive vendors will also have obtain to thorough shopper health information and facts to observe affected person development and far better control care. As vital, MDLive will be capable to refer our shoppers to higher-undertaking in-community vendors.

Cigna made a decision to do this following launching a digital wellness application with MDLive in 2020, finding that additional than 3-fourths of individuals who did a digital wellness screening very last calendar year did not have a most important care suppliers, and two-thirds identified a wellbeing ailment as a outcome of the screening.

It also tapped MDLive to offer behavioral telehealth companies shortly right before the pandemic.

Cigna, which had been an trader in the telehealth corporation, moved to purchase MDLive previously this yr, incorporating it with its wellbeing products and services portfolio, Evernorth.

Photograph credit: Anastasia Usenko, Getty Illustrations or photos