At Destiny Health, which offers a savings-account-like plan to almost 300 Illinois-based employers, CFO and Interim CIO David W. Goltz has built a cost calculator to help employees estimate how much to put in their Personal Medical Fund, or PMF. Consumers estimate the number of doctor visits, medical procedures and drug purchases they anticipate in the coming year, and the calculator calculates their expected expenses. It also spits out how much consumers should put in their savings account. Much like financial investors, health-care consumers will be able to manage their entire portfolio online, doing such tasks as checking prescriptions, requesting and receiving reimbursements electronically, changing addresses or adding dependents.

WEB CONTENT

Web content is a prerequisite for all these new CRM-based plans. Consumers like accessing health information online. In fact, more Americans go online to do health research than to hunt for stock quotes, check sports news or shop, according to a recent survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Casurella works hard at creating a consistent look and feel to her site’s content, which comes from all over the Web. Goltz says he puts time into translating content from the jargony insurance industry into terms consumers understand. Goodman’s vision for Web content is for customers to be able to access patient reviews of doctors, a concept not that different from what’s done with books on Amazon.com.

All of this is secondary in importance to the credibility of content. Many consumer sites fill their pages with content written in marketese by the company itself. In health care, that won’t fly. So the CIOs cull content from sources that consumers already trust, sources such as the American Medical Association and Johns Hopkins University.

Aetna Senior Vice President and CIO Wei-Tih Cheng has gone one step further. Staff physicians from Harvard Medical School review all of Aetna’s Web content, which is gathered under the brand InteliHealth, a subsidiary.

CORE TECHNOLOGY

CIOs can be as innovative as they please on the consumer-facing side of their new insurance plans. But claims still have to get processed. If they don’t, the new model will fail. And if the claims systems, or prescription databases, can’t send their data to the new websites as soon as the data is entered, then the personalized websites for the insured will contain erroneous information.

As always, integration is key. When you build new systems, you have to make them serve the legacy systems, not the other way around. Meshing the new with the old is done by using brand-name players, Casurella explains. "We develop based on Java. We make sure it will scale." She says proprietary is the enemy here.