The enhancements will make your selling experience easier than ever before.

Cigna’s Value Based Enrollment (VBE) initiative continues to be a successful and well-received program among Cigna Healthcare agents.

As part of this program, agents can earn $75 or $125 (depending on the plan) for facilitating Health Risk Assessments (HRAs) with their eligible customers, which means more money in their pocket!

New Way to Access HRAs

Cigna has heard your feedback and have worked to make HRA facilitation easier and faster than before.

Starting on September 29, 2023, you will be able to access Cigna Healthcare’s HRA in the following locations:

• SunFire or ConnectureDRX: HRA embedded in each program for agents that are fully integrated into the respective vendor platform.
• Cigna for Brokers: For non-SunFire users and/or non-Connecture agency partners – Use single sign-on to access SunFire HRA via the “Health Risk Assessment” link in the Tools section.
• eEnrollment: Embedded at the end of the customer enrollment process (i.e., via SunFire HRA widget – HRA will be embedded directly within eEnrollment).

Current HRA Tool – Icario

You can continue to use the Icario tool to facilitate HRAs with your customers until January 1, 2024. After this date, Icario will no longer be available to facilitate HRAs, but you will be able to use the new tools listed above – SunFire and ConnectureDRX.

What is a Health Risk Assessment (HRA)?

The Health Risk Assessment (HRA) is a tool that helps the health plan assess a customer’s needs by asking a series of health-related questions. Answers are used to partner with health care providers and to develop a plan of care.

Facilitating an HRA for your customers provides you an additional opportunity to engage with them and solidify your relationship. It also helps jump start the customer’s journey, engagement, and utilization of Cigna Healthcare’s services resulting in increased retention and improved outcomes for the customer.

If you facilitate an HRA for your customers, you are eligible to receive payment, which varies depending on the plan they enroll in.

What Medicare plan types are eligible for the VBE HRA payment?

The HRA payment will be made for new Medicare Advantage customers, and voluntary customer plan changes that result in active Cigna Healthcare customers.

Agents earn $125 when facilitating an HRA with D-SNP and C-SNP customers, and $75 for all other Cigna Healthcare MAPD customers.

Prerequisites and Requirements

To be authorized to facilitate the VBE HRA, you must:

• Complete VBE HRA training via Producers’ University. (VBE HRA training is no longer a separate or standalone course – we have embedded the content as a downloadable PDF in Our Compliance Program.)
• Qualify as ‘Ready to Sell’ to complete the enrollment application with the customer.

After you complete the VBE HRA training, you will receive access to Cigna Healthcare’s electronic HRA within 24-72 hours (if you are ‘Ready to Sell’).

Deadlines to Submit HRAs

You must facilitate the HRA with the customer and submit the completed HRA in the portal, within ten (10) calendar days of the customer’s application sign date, in order to ensure a positive customer experience.

As a best practice, you should obtain the HRA immediately after completing the customer’s application for enrollment. Otherwise, we recommend confirming your next appointment with the customer with the date and time details, prior to making the next outreach.

You’ll have until December 22, 2023 to submit the HRA for any customer applications taken from October 1 – December 7 of 2023.

Sourced from Cigna broker email communication from 5/16/23:

Changes to VBE payments for digital applications starting with June 1 effectives.

At Cigna Healthcare, we believe that the Primary Care Provider (PCP) and patient relationship is of vital importance to drive better health outcomes and increase customer satisfaction and retention.

For this reason, we are making changes in how payments are earned through our Value Based Enrollment (VBE) digital application program to further promote the PCP and patient relationship and continue to encourage the collection of a customer email address. This change applies to June 1 effectives and beyond.

New VBE payment amounts

Here’s how you can continue to earn up to $50 per approved digital application for new Cigna Healthcare Medicare Advantage (MA) customers:

• Earn $30 for including a valid in-network PCP on the digital application.
• Earn $20 for including a valid customer email address on the digital application.

For more information on this change to our VBE program, please feel free to review our VBE Program Broker FAQ after logging in to Producers’ University.

Benefits of this program change

Capturing a customer’s valid PCP and email address at the time of enrollment gives Cigna Healthcare Medicare important information to provide better care for your customers.

Better care results in higher customer satisfaction and retention rates, as well as higher net promoter scores (NPS). This means you can spend more time selling and growing your business and less time addressing customer concerns.

Sourced from Cigna Broker communication from 10/24/22:

Read below for tips to facilitate your transition to the new portal

On October 12, Cigna launched the new and improved Icario Connect Agent Portal. This new agent portal includes features that make it easier for you to facilitate health risk assessments (HRAs) with your customers. 

As part of the transition to the new portal, all existing agents should have received a Welcome Email from Icario inviting them to create new login credentials. We are happy that many agents have been able to transition to the new agent portal smoothly.

 For those of you who have still not activated your new agent portal, we have put together some helpful tips and resources to help you along the way. 

Registration Issues

 Agents who have not registered in the new Icario agent portal will receive daily emails from Icario with their new username and password. If you have not received the email, please check your spam folder or follow the steps below:

1. Email Icario directly at service@Icariohealth.com.
2. Call our Cigna Agent Resource Line (CARL) at 866-442-7516

Password Issues

 If you are experiencing any issues with your new password (e.g., new password is not working), please follow the steps below. 

1. Reply to the Icario Welcome Email informing Icario that your new password is not working. Icario will reach out directly to assist you.
2. Email Icario directly at service@Icariohealth.com.
3. Call our Cigna Agent Resource Line (CARL) at 866-442-7516

Other Technical Issues

 If you are still experiencing technical difficulties after following the steps above, please try the following:

• Clear the cache in your browser.
• Disable your pop-up blocker.
• Check your spam folder for emails from Icario.
• Type in your new username and password to ensure accuracy (do not copy and paste from the Icario Welcome Email).
• Use capital letters when entering the Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI) on the Prospective Member screen (e.g., 1AC2-D34-EF56)

One more thing… Great News!  The deadline to submit your HRAs has been extended! Agents now have until 12/21/2022 to submit the HRA for any customer applications taken from 10/1/2022 – 12/7/2022.

Sourced from Cigna Broker Communication from 10/14/22:

Kroger and its affiliated pharmacies recently notified Cigna that they would not participate in Cigna’s Medicare Advantage (MAPD) and Prescription Drug Plan (PDP) network, effective January 1, 2023. Please note, 2022 is not impacted.

We understand that the annual enrollment period (AEP) begins tomorrow and the timing of this announcement is less than ideal. However, we were only recently notified of the contract change with Kroger for 2023 and we felt it was important to share this information with you and your brokers regardless of the pre-AEP timing. We’ve sent communications to brokers licensed within each impacted market that includes the name(s) of the Kroger pharmacy or affiliate impacted by this change. Attached is a complete list of Kroger Pharmacy Affiliates for your reference.

As you can imagine, our AEP materials were prepared well in advance. We are diligently working to update the CMS Plan Finder, sales kits, Cigna’s online provider directory, and other online tools. In fact, updates to the online tools will be made by October 24.

We are doing everything we can to make this transition as smooth as possible for our customers. While we understand the disruption, Cigna Medicare has more than 63,000 network pharmacies available nationwide, which are listed in our online provider directory. Here are a few other large pharmacy chains that continue to be available to our customers:
• Walgreens
• Walmart
• Publix
• Rite Aid
• Winn-Dixie

Mail order is also available, delivering prescriptions right to customers’ mailboxes.

To provide you some insight into our member outreach strategy, beginning November 1, we will notify customers who have used a Kroger pharmacy in the past six months that Kroger and its affiliated pharmacies are terminating. In addition to the letter, we will actively engage customers through proactive, outbound calls to help them find an in-network pharmacy nearby. Our customer service team is also prepared to offer customers convenient alternative pharmacies for them to use

VIEW THE Affiliated pharmacies owned and operated by Kroger HERE