News Releases

HARTFORD, Conn., July 16, 2009 — Aetna (NYSE: ΑET) today announced an agreement with The Jellyvision Lab to offer Aetna Personal Benefits Advisor^SM, an online decision support experience, to employers nationwide. Personal Benefits Advisor, created exclusively for Aetna, leads consumers through a highly personalized online conversation to help them make important decisions about their health benefits. It includes three modules. The first helps employees choose the medical and dental plan that best meets their needs. The second is a life and disability module to determine how much insurance they will need. The third educates employees about other benefits that may be available to them, including pharmacy, Employee Assistance Program services and online tools such as a personal health record.

“In the same way that many of us now depend on a global positioning device to help find a destination, Personal Benefits Advisor helps Aetna members navigate the challenges associated with choosing a benefits plan,” said Karen Weinseiss, Aetna’s head of innovation and product management. “We understand that for many employees, making decisions about health insurance benefits can be quite confusing. This new tool simplifies the process. It focuses only on the needs of the person sitting in front of the screen.”

Employees using Aetna Personal Benefits Advisor are greeted by an on-screen host who begins the session by learning about the employee. The host asks questions about family status, dependents, current state of an employee’s health, health care needs, lifestyle, financial status and sensitivities around risk. Questions are asked in common language – avoiding the jargon often associated with choosing a benefits plan. The virtual host asks questions and the information he provides is based on an employee’s responses. In the medical and dental module, based on the information provided by the employee, the host highlights the plan that would work the best for the employee’s individual needs and then offers to walk through the plan in detail. In the life insurance module, the virtual host helps the employee think through the financial support that would actually be needed by loved ones and calculates a total.

“We’ve created conversations that do everything from teaching reading comprehension, to selling personal computers, to choosing a college. But Aetna was the first to launch a Jellyvision conversation to help employees select their health insurance benefits,” said Harry Gottlieb, founder & CEO of The Jellyvision Lab. “We’re really pleased to collaborate with Aetna on Personal Benefits Advisor. We both believe that this online experience will transform open enrollment, by reducing costs for companies and dramatically improving the experience of millions of employees.”

Aetna Personal Benefits Advisor was piloted with several customers in the last nine months – most notably with federal employees. When surveyed about whether the experience was helpful, on a 5-point scale, 96 percent of employees gave it a 4 or 5, with 77 percent giving it a 5. Thousands of those surveyed said that Aetna Personal Benefits Advisor was informative, personalized, engaging and easy to understand. Employers also noted that Aetna Personal Benefits Advisor is convenient as it is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It may also reduce open enrollment costs by reducing the number of meetings and printed materials, as well as calls into the Human Resources benefits office. Aetna Personal Benefits Advisor is now available to employers of any size nationwide.

A demo of Aetna Personal Benefits Advisor illustrates the power of this new technology and is available to reporters who request it or visit: http://www.aetna.com/showcase/advisor/

About Aetna 

Aetna is one of the nation’s leading diversified health care benefits companies, serving approximately 37.2 million people with information and resources to help them make better informed decisions about their health care. Aetna offers a broad range of traditional and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life and disability plans, and medical management capabilities and health care management services for Medicaid plans. Our customers include employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans, governmental units, government-sponsored plans, labor groups and expatriates. For more information, see www.aetna.com and Aetna's Annual Report at www.aetna.com/2008annualreport.

About The Jellyvision Lab

The Jellyvision Lab is an interactive design company with a unique vision for human-machine interface.  Known for creating award-winning, best-selling interactive entertainment properties such as YOU DON’T KNOW JACK and the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire CD-ROM, the company’s expertise lies in interface design: we create intelligent interfaces that simulate human conversation.  Thus we call our experiences “conversations.” A well-crafted conversation has seamless pacing and awareness, personality and wit, so that it feels like a real person is just behind the machine. The Jellyvision Lab assists larger organizations with marketing, lead conversion, training, consumer education and decision-making. Please check out our web site, www.jellyvisionlab.com, for more info and examples.