Breast cancer, the leading cost driver in oncology, poses formidable financial challenges for patients and healthcare providers alike. In response, Cigna Healthcare is prioritizing improved patient outcomes and cost management through partnerships and tailored support initiatives. At the heart of this strategy is Cigna’s collaboration with the Know Your Lemons Foundation, a partnership dedicated to elevating awareness and empowering individuals with essential knowledge about breast health.
For Margaux Currie, senior director of Commercial Medical Clinical Solutions and Strategy at Cigna, this mission has taken on a profound personal significance. At 39, while preparing for a concert, she discovered a lump in her chest, which led to a diagnosis of stage 3 breast cancer. “I always assumed this was something I’d never have to worry about,” Currie told PYMNTS.
Despite a healthy lifestyle, no family history, and a negative BRCA test, Currie faced a harsh reality. She immediately started chemotherapy and eventually underwent a double mastectomy and radiation treatment and will be on maintenance therapy for 10 years.
This experience not only deepened her understanding of the challenges patients face but fueled her commitment to leading initiatives that empower others through education and support. Currie spearheaded initiatives at Cigna aimed at offering customized support for patients. To address these varied needs, Cigna implemented key strategies:
In an interview with PYMNTS, Shannon Olson, VP of U.S. Employer Strategy and Core Solutions for Cigna Healthcare, explained the “main goal of our recent breast cancer campaigns and partnerships — like the one we now have with Know Your Lemons — is about improving customer outcomes and support for people with breast cancer and those who are at risk. This ultimately helps manage costs because customers are then armed with the right information to take control of their health in the most effective ways, be it preventive or after a diagnosis.”
Cigna recognized a significant gap in breast health awareness, noting that 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, with 85% having no family history. To address this, Cigna partnered with the Know Your Lemons Foundation to launch a breast health awareness campaign for its commercial clients. The initiative features a recorded webinar on breast health and customizable email templates for employers, all at no cost. Participants also receive a 10% discount on Know Your Lemons merchandise to encourage app engagement.
“And what is most compelling is this program works,” Olson explained. “Studies have found up to a 24% increase in mammograms. The use of lemons normalizes breast health among families, sexes, and friends so that important messages of action are delivered.”
This success underscores the role of organizations like the Know Your Lemons Foundation, whose CEO, Corrine Ellsworth Beaumont, explained how her organization complements Cigna’s efforts to elevate breast cancer awareness and education.
“The Know Your Lemons app isn’t just for those directly affected by breast cancer — it’s also designed to support caregivers and family members,” Ellsworth Beaumont told PYMNTS. “We include sections that help loved ones understand what breast cancer is, how to recognize symptoms, and how they can support their person emotionally and practically. By educating both the patient and their support system, the app fosters a shared understanding and makes it easier to navigate the healthcare journey together.”
The app simplifies breast health education, using imagery like its signature lemons to illustrate the 12 signs of breast cancer. Ellsworth Beaumont noted that it guides users through self-exams, sends personalized reminders, and offers information on risk factors and screening. Feedback has been “incredibly positive,” with users feeling more confident in self-exams. The foundation measures effectiveness by tracking engagement with features and educational modules.
“What’s most rewarding are the stories from users who say they caught their cancer early thanks to what they learned in the app,” Ellsworth Beaumont added.
As Cigna marks Breast Cancer Awareness Month, it underscores its commitment to supporting those affected by the disease while Currie’s leadership has infused a personal touch into these initiatives.
Survivors have shared, Olson said, that “the most difficult part is immediately following diagnosis, knowing you have cancer and needing to wait to start treatment or surgery,” with this anxiety potentially leading to unnecessary ER visits and high costs. Cigna helps alleviate this by offering behavioral health support right after diagnosis, helping patients manage anxiety, and avoid additional treatments.
Cigna’s approach prioritizes community support as well, believing patients fare better with caregiver backing. In 2025, the company plans to launch a digital platform featuring videos from survivors sharing their experiences. “Getting through treatment can be as much a mental challenge as it is physical,” Olson stated. “Providing the right support helps improve outcomes.”
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) promises to improve operational efficiencies and the customer experience offered by enterprises.
The advanced technology is finding applications in loan underwriting and fraud detection, and now it’s moving across borders.
TerraPay Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Ram Sundaram told PYMNTS as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series focused on exploring AI’s use in banking and by FinTechs that automated decision making and streamlined processes will continue to transform global money movement, especially as faster payments gain ground in cross-border transactions. That’s the inexorable trend, but as Sundaram put it, there’s still room, and a necessity, to have some human interaction in the mix.
In terms of global fund flows, TerraPay’s single connection ties more than 3.7 billion mobile wallets together across 200 sending and 144 receiving countries, touching 7.5 billion bank accounts. As one might imagine, coordinating and enabling the transactions is complex.
“Obviously, in the best-case scenario, everything goes smoothly, but when things are not going smoothly, that’s when the customer queries come in,” Sundaram said.
It’s no easy task to find out straight away where a transaction is, as analysts and representatives at the company have to look at logs and query partner systems.
“A lot of that work is done manually,” said Sundaram, who added that the agents “know the corridors and the markets that they are working in, but it still takes some time.”
TerraPay is using AI models with machine learning to bolster customer support and automate tasks as financial institutions (TerraPay’s client base) send payments in real time, and those payments are processed into local markets’ beneficiary banks.
“We still don’t trust [AI models] to let them respond to the customer straight away, but we can do the analysis, and then that gets reviewed by an agent who decides if [information] is accurate or not and then sends it off,” Sundaram said.
The same principles are guiding AI models and company practices to improve technical and security operations, analyzing and categorizing anomalous transactions and automating integrations with partner firms.
“Compliance is an issue where there is a lot of review needed of the alerts, and we are using [AI models] to speed up those processes,” Sundaram said.
Asked by PYMNTS about how agentic AI can be harnessed, he said: “In financial services, you can’t take chances on technology like this, which has the freedom to go wrong. You have to be careful about making sure that it’s 100% reliable before we can let things run entirely by automation.”
Agentic AI also remains pricey. For example, OpenAI is charging $20,000 a month for its specialized agents. However, Sundaram said the industry will become commoditized quickly, which will lower prices, and some open-source offerings are capable.
“There’s a fire hose of news about breakthroughs and new ideas and new ways of doing things that are coming out on a daily basis,” he said.
Data underpins it all, and Sundaram told PYMNTS that no matter what the application, the information fed into the models must be clean. Most organizations have a range of data sitting in different intra-company silos, and those silos need to come down.
In addition, the data must be structured so that it is accessible and can be synthesized by the models. Many firms may have more than 1,000 software-as-a-service (SaaS) resources to which they are subscribed but are not accurately tracked or monitored.
“Every database is separated, each one sitting somewhere else,” he said.
The days of stitching together those separate SaaS offerings to run an enterprise are ending, he said, and we’re headed to a future when data is collected in one place.
AI models and agentic AI “are extensions of what we’ve always valued at TerraPay, which means building the most efficient infrastructure possible in order to make sure that transactions are processed safely, quickly and affordably,” Sundaram told PYMNTS. “We see AI and [AI models] as powerful tools that help us scale all this very quickly while making sure we build more and more efficiency into the system.”
