Media Center

Farmington, CT – ConnectiCare has been ranked #13 of 239 health plans by U.S. News & World Report/NCQA America’s Best Health Plans 2008. The annual rankings are based on industry wide measures for quality and customer satisfaction. This is the fourth consecutive year that ConnectiCare has been ranked in the top 15 of all health plans in America.

Mickey Herbert, President and CEO, said “We are proud to be recognized as one of the best health plans in America. Connecticut citizens are fortunate to have some of the best health plans in the country here. Second only to Massachusetts, Connecticut by far has the highest ranked health plans in the country.”

“The components that make up this ranking show the value that private health plans deliver to their members. As a member of a top health plan, you are more likely to receive prevention services, the proper treatments, and help managing chronic diseases such as diabetes.”

A total of 239 of the nation’s health plans were ranked by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). The rankings were based on a combination of member satisfaction, clinical quality, and NCQA Accreditation scores.

The scores are grouped in three categories:

• Consumer Experience: Measures about consumer experience with getting care, as well as satisfaction with plan physicians and with health plan services.
• Prevention: Measures of how often preventive services are provided, for example childhood and adolescent access to preventative visits, immunizations, and women’s reproductive health and cancer screenings.
• Treatment: Measures of how well health plans take care of people who have health problems, such as asthma, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, osteoporosis, alcohol and drug dependence, mental illness and whether physicians advised smokers to quit.

Dr. Paul Bluestein, Chief Medical Officer, says “One of the many scores included in the ranking is how many of our members receive a colon cancer screening. Colon cancer is often curable if detected early, yet many people are reluctant to get screened. We put a program in place to encourage screening and sent members home pre-screening kits. As a result, several of our members detected potential early stage tumors that may have been missed otherwise. Currently, 68% of our members age 50 or older get screened, compared to less than 50% nationally. This translates into a real impact on people’s health.”

The rankings will appear in the print edition of the U.S. News & World Report that will appear on newsstands on November 10th, as well as the U.S. News website. For more details about the methodology used to rank plans, please visit NCQA.

ConnectiCare is a health plan based in Farmington, Connecticut and a member of the HIP Family of Health Plans. ConnectiCare serves 240,000 members. The company was home-grown in Connecticut and has 500 employees who reside mainly in the Hartford area. Visit our website: www.connecticare.com

The National Committee for Quality Assurance is a private, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. Since its founding in 1990, NCQA has been a central figure in driving improvement throughout the health care system, helping to elevate the issue of health care quality to the top of the national agenda. www.ncqa.org