Your employees' lives are demanding. Their work is demanding. But accessing the care they need to be healthy and productive shouldn't be. This is where virtual care can play a helpful role.

Virtual care covers a surprisingly broad array of health care services, some of which are underutilized and largely unknown to the general population. Here are six virtual services that, if utilized, can help improve the health of your employees and support the long-term growth of your company.

1. Virtual Primary Care

It’s well-known that preventive checkups and wellness screenings keep workers healthy and productive. Routine care visits with the same primary care provider (PCP) can help them better manage existing health conditions and prevent others from developing. Virtual care options are quickly evolving to meet this need.

A report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) found that 20% of those with employer-sponsored health benefits accounted for 80% of employers' spending on health care. A significant number of these employees had chronic conditions. In addition to higher care costs for employees and the impact of higher utilization on health insurance costs, chronic conditions affect productivity, costing U.S. employers $36.4 billion per year due to missed days of work. Whatever barriers keep employees from getting the support they need will inevitably hurt them and your company.

Early screening is especially important for older employees and those in traditionally underserved groups. For example, diabetes and asthma disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic/Latino people. Breast cancers are usually detected at later stages for Black adults, which lowers survival rates and requires more aggressive, sometimes debilitating, treatment.

Making primary care available remotely helps close gaps in care as well as maintain and improve the health of all your employees —not just those with ready access to health care facilities.

Consider this real-world experience of one of our employees. Instead of the parent missing work and the child missing school to drive 60 minutes each way to the provider's office—first, for a blood draw, and then to meet with the physician to discuss the results—they instead went to a nearby lab after school. When the results were ready, they had a video appointment with the doctor from home. Virtual care saved this parent time and money, reduced stress, improved care efficiency, and—best of all—the blood work results came back with a positive outcome.

To ensure virtual checkups, screenings, and chronic condition management are conducted correctly, you need the right platform. Cigna Healthcare, for example, supports virtual primary care through MDLIVE.[i] Employees and their eligible dependents age 18+ can easily connect to a board-certified PCP for preventive care, including a virtual wellness screening, all on a schedule that works for them. Other benefits of the MDLIVE platform include the following:

• Preventive care checkups[ii] and wellness screenings are available at no additional cost to identify conditions early.
• Routine care visits allow your employees to build a relationship with the same PCP to help manage conditions.
• Prescriptions are available through home delivery or at local pharmacies, if appropriate.

Coordinated, team-based primary care is the foundation of optimal health, but it doesn't end there. Neither does virtual care.

2. Virtual Bone and Joint Care

Virtual bone and joint care makes a tremendous difference in health and financial outcomes. Musculoskeletal conditions, such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and spine-related neck and back problems, can be excruciating for your employees, affecting their physical and mental health as well as their ability to work. These conditions represent a considerable financial burden with regard to both direct and indirect costs and these costs continue to rise. Timely care helps relieves symptoms, which enhances well-being and can reduce absenteeism. It also helps avoid costly and invasive treatments, such as surgery.

And yes, bone and joint care can be delivered virtually. A middle-aged father of three who hurt his back during a weekend touch football game doesn't have to upend his life to participate in care. He can schedule it around his kids' activities and other obligations. With this level of flexibility, it makes sense that virtual bone and joint care increases adherence to the exercise program.

3. Virtual Dental Care

Virtual dental care comes as a surprise to many people. Virtual technology not only supports access to online scheduling and patient portals but to dental care itself.

Cigna Healthcare Dental Virtual Care[iv] allows an employee to consult with a dentist at any time for urgent needs, such as toothaches, gum inflammation, broken teeth, or infections. Dentists can prescribe non-narcotic medications, including antibiotics, and provide follow-up care. For employees with a fear of dentists, this can be the first step to dental care: They can access national teledental care providers via myCigna.com without having to leave their homes.

Such services increase access to dental care through virtual appointments. They allow dentists to triage dental emergencies and even conduct remote orthodontia checkups—a game changer for many busy parents.

Cigna Healthcare's experience reveals that virtual consultations cost an average of 17% less than an in-network exam and 48% less than an out-of-network exam. [v] Moreover, in 2021, 73% of customers who used Cigna Healthcare Dental Virtual Care avoided the ER.[vi] Steering people away from the ER not only drives savings but also allows your workers to get the care they need, when they need it, from dental professionals—not overburdened ER staff.

4. Virtual Lifestyle Change Programs

Lifestyle and behavior change programs often include smartwatches, continuous glucose monitors, and smart scales. These can be integrated remotely with other virtual care tools to provide feedback to individuals and share health information with providers.

Take diabetes, for instance. Today, roughly a third of American adults have prediabetes, and most are unaware of it—despite the fact that prediabetes increases the risks of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. African Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, American Indians, Pacific Islanders, and some Asian Americans are at even higher risk.

Deployed correctly, digital behavior-change interventions can positively influence health behaviors. Research suggests that receiving feedback from monitors—specifically glucose and physical activity monitors—can increase awareness of how lifestyle choices affect one's health. However, patients also need education and support.

The Cigna Healthcare Diabetes Prevention Program does just this. It's a collaboration with Omada, a digital program recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that focuses on reducing the risk of diabetes through healthy weight loss. It's customized to each individual, with personalized virtual support, education, and digitally enabled tools to help shift an individual’s health mindset and ultimately improve their overall health and wellbeing.

A 60-year-old sales executive with prediabetes will be able to engage with the type of program needed based on age, other health conditions, and fitness level. It's highly customized, providing the level of support and education required each step of the way. Meanwhile, employers receive a convenient, connected experience and valuable investment via easy administration and implementation; ongoing support through a dedicated Cigna Healthcare service team; and seamless billing and reporting tools.

5. Virtual Specialty Care—Dermatology

All the challenges that virtual care solves—transportation, the need for culturally competent care, time constraints, etc.—become even more acute when seeking specialty care. Lack of access to specialty care leads to worse outcomes and increases health disparities. This poses a particular problem for employees and employers living and working in rural areas of the country. But fortunately, virtual specialty care is becoming increasingly available. For Cigna Healthcare, one such area of care is dermatology.

Through MDLIVE, Cigna Healthcare's dermatology[vii] approach includes diagnosis and customized treatment plans, usually within 24 hours. Board-certified dermatologists can assess a variety of common skin, hair, and nail conditions, such as acne, eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, suspicious spots, and more, and write prescriptions if appropriate. Perhaps most importantly, they can assess potentially pre-cancerous spots via email without an in-person appointment. Rather than having to take the time to travel to a specialist to look at a seemingly benign mole, you can simply upload an image at any time.

6. Virtual Specialty Care—Psychiatry

Psychiatry is another focus of the virtual specialty care that Cigna Healthcare provides. This field faces acute provider shortages, which is why virtual options are so important. Most people are aware of online therapy but maybe not that you can have a consultation with a psychiatrist or manage medications remotely—a key aspect of the mental health care continuum. There's another added benefit, too: For some people, there's still a stigma attached to seeking psychiatric care. The ability to do so in private can spell the difference between receiving appropriate care and untreated mental illness.

The need for mental health care continues to grow. Cigna Healthcare's network is expanding to meet that need, offering several programs that can help employees access the behavioral health care they need to be fully well. Cigna’s mental health network is more than 250,000 providers strong. Cigna's virtual mental health network is more than 100,000 providers strong. To address the needs of at-risk communities, we continue to expand our network of providers to best serve the unique needs and identities of patients—for example, the number of Black providers in our network has grown by 35% since 2020, and 30% of our network providers specialize in supporting the LGBTQ+ community.[viii]

MDLIVE for behavioral health grants your employees access to talk therapy and psychiatry from the privacy of their homes, with appointments typically scheduled within a week. Cigna Healthcare's partnership with Brightside provides similar services and unlimited access to providers through messaging and video visits, with a focus on medication management and evidence-based therapy for depression and anxiety. The average wait time for a medication appointment is around two days, because your employees shouldn't have to wait for weeks to start feeling better.

Empower Your Employees, Grow Your Business

Cigna Healthcare's ever-expanding virtual offerings support whole-person health, including chronic care management, primary and specialty care, bone and joint care, and even dental care. Your workers have different health and wellness needs. You wouldn't give them all identical tools to do their jobs, so why expect them to access health care in the same way?

Virtual care recognizes the diverse needs of your employees. By empowering them with a range of digital options, Cigna Healthcare meets them where they are. With the right virtual care solutions, your organization can enjoy better population health, greater employee engagement, increased productivity, and lower total costs of care. Healthier employees mean a healthier business.

Contact a Cigna Healthcare representative or your broker to discover how to future-proof your business with healthy employees.