The year 2005 will go down as the year of the electronic medical record for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. The health plan expects to give more than a million members access to electronic records this year.

Chris Levan, CIO for Chattanooga-based BCBST, said that the health plan's main initiatives for 2005 are focused on provider service redesign, disease management, electronic medical records, government business expansion, HIPAA security, a national "Blues" data warehouse and Internet reporting.

The two biggest initiatives include EMRs and disease management. "We hope to roll out electronic medical records to many healthcare providers and members," Levan said. "We would hope that over a million members will have improved access to the right healthcare by year end."

As part of BCBST's disease management initiative, Second Generation Care Management is designed to ensure that sick people are receiving the right care in the right setting and at the right cost and quality. Levan said that BCBST is implementing this initiative "to improve healthcare delivery and make healthcare affordable for all."

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois has several goals set for 2005.

Patrick Moroney, senior vice president and CIO of Chicago, Ill.-based HealthCare Service, said BCBSIL will continue to facilitate a business/IT strategic alignment process to ensure effective use of capital investment; drive best practices in IT government, control and operations to provide a predictable, transparent and service-oriented operational model; meet HIPAA security and SOX implementation dates; increase performance on service levels for major systems and drive customer relationship management capabilities to better enable consumer-directed capabilities; enable M&A growth through effective integration; and support a long-term plan to re-architect BCBSIL's technology platforms scale to growth, administrative and medical cost initiatives, and employer of choice workforce development strategy.

Moroney said that driving IT cultural and operational change to meet HIPAA Security and SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) compliance is the most significant IT initiative for 2005.

"While many of these efforts tangentially impact our HIPAA and SOX compliance, while satisfying our legal mandates, they are also a nice and timely enabler to ensuring effective governance and control of IT, which builds a great foundation for how we want to serve our business and our customers in the future," said Moroney.

Dr. Wei-Tih Cheng, senior vice president and CIO of Aetna, said the health plan's main goals for 2005 will be to increase its capability and capacity to handle ever-increasing technology demands.

Aetna is planning to standardize architectures and platforms, increase efficiency and continue to deliver application and network availability for its internal business partners.

"That means providing technology that helps Aetna be easy to do business with and supports the increased consumer choice trends in healthcare," Cheng said. "It is our job to provide self-service abilities - such as Web- or voiced-based technologies - that are of the highest quality and reduce the hassle factor for our members and customers."

With its goal of becoming the trusted source of relevant information to help its members manage their health and wealth, Aetna is developing integrated and flexible IT capabilities in order to deliver speed-to-market at a reasonable cost.

"As the CIO, I will focus my personal attention on developing Aetna's information services unit into a high performing organization," Cheng said.

He noted that Aetna's continuous goal of making consumer interaction with Aetna as satisfying as possible will be one of the critical IT efforts for Aetna. A cornerstone project that will be fully implemented in 2005 is one that will provide automated call management functions and improved access to customer information for customer service personnel.

"This system will provide consistent information to help our representatives quickly answer customer inquiries as well as to identify opportunities for members to be enrolled in disease management programs for better quality of care at reduced costs," said Cheng.

He added that the project represents a major initiative to enhance customer service by presenting information consistently and increasing customer satisfaction through automated documentation of all encounters.