Cigna Europe launches global healthcare strategy
The international health insurance and assistance firm has announced a ‘five-year strategic overhaul’ to its healthcare plans, ‘Whole Health’
Cigna Europe’s new Whole Health vision, which the company says will help globally mobile employees address the significant disruption to their lives that has been caused by the pandemic, is designed to better meet the needs of employees in a rapidly changing world.
Health, Cigna says, is more than just physical and mental health: “It’s everything that makes up our world; our family, friends, work-life balance, access to care, finances and home environment. A difficulty in any one of these areas can have an immediate knock-on effect on a person’s whole health.”
A such, Whole Health will work with employers to ensure that employees receive comprehensive, tailored support and tools to help people face the demands of modern life, including maintaining that all-important work-life balance, supporting with social and family life, as well as counselling for financial concerns.
In a recent study, Cigna identified that a holistic approach to healthcare was a sure-fire way to reap the best rewards, through reduced costs, increased engagement and overall improved healthcare outcomes.
An evolved way of looking at wellbeing
“Our lives aren’t two-dimensional and health services shouldn’t be either,” said Arjan Toor, CEO, Cigna Europe. “It’s time to look at the bigger picture and acknowledge that our lives are complex, particularly right now, and what works on paper may not work for people’s realities. Whole Health is an evolved way of looking at wellbeing. It allows us to look at the most important parts of people’s daily lives, not just their physical health, and holistically understand and support them. We believe it's time to transform traditional healthcare solutions, and our new proposition has been developed with this in mind – to meet our customer’s new and ever-changing needs.
“Our new vision aims to tackle this and offer support in all the key areas of people’s lives; to help expats adapt in a world wrestling with a pandemic and to create a stepping-stone towards better all-round health for everyone. The wellbeing culture has moved from being a nice-to-have, to a greater strategic issue, and it’s crucial that we evolve our proposition to meet our customer’s new and evolving needs.”
In November 2020, Toor told Hospitals & Healthcare why it was so important to protect employees’ mental health and wellbeing, no matter where they are in the world.