MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – Cigna HealthCare’s April announcement that the health plan would deploy Intuit’s online health tool, Quicken Health, to its members in 2008 marks an early victory for the partnership between Intuit and Ingenix.
The two companies are working on services to solve a number of consumer problems related to managing the financial end of healthcare and healthcare benefits, said Dan Levin, general manager for Intuit’s Quicken Health Group.
The solutions will span such financial challenges as reconciling bills, paying bills, making tradeoffs between the tax advantages of various accounts and offering specialized future planning.
“Both organizations recognize the healthcare expertise and the consumer expertise required to pull off something this complex in the healthcare industry,” said Bill Whitely, chief marketing officer of Ingenix.
The two companies have been working with health plans and consumers to get consumer data in a secure and accessible format. “What we’ve done well is spend time with them to understand their priorities and find the simplest and most reliable path to the correct answer,” Whitely said. “We want to contribute something that is tremendously usable and responsive to consumers.”
Intuit’s decision to partner with Ingenix was a smart move, said Carl Doty, senior analyst for Forrester Research. He pointed out Intuit’s existing relationships with thousands of financial institutions and its success in the consumer market with its other products.
“If they can successfully develop the healthcare equivalent of OFX (open financial exchange), I think that this relationship will yield significant rewards,” he said.
Despite his acknowledgement that Intuit has been aggressive in its entrance into the healthcare market, Doty said he’s not ready to call the company’s position dominant – at least not yet.
He noted that Aetna is creating approaches with strong consumer appeal through its ActiveHealth solution. “Many other payers are also considering these kinds of solutions,” he said.
“Our hope is that, over time, every health plan in the country will engage with us, and Quicken Health provides consumer help in understanding healthcare issues,” Levin said.