The Philadelphia-based CIGNA health insurance company launched an interactive Web site Wednesday that will make it simple for 170,000 Atlantans and 10 million Americans to shop for the best doctors, medications and hospitals near their homes.

Available only to CIGNA Healthcare plan members, the site offers interactive step-by-step tools that do everything from ranking doctors and hospitals by cost and quality measures to locating nearby pharmacies with the lowest prices and diagnose various medical issues.

For example, if a user enters a description of an ailment, such as "knee pain," the site will provide possible causes and questions to ask a doctor. The site also identifies hospitals in specific areas with the lowest death and complication rates.

"There are Web sites and tools you can use for a variety of other plans, but this is the most sophisticated I've seen," said William Custer, director of the Center for Health Services Research at Georgia State University, who spent an hour playing around on the Web site.

He said he was impressed and that it will "obviously make things much easier for CIGNA's enrollees," which number 200,000 in Georgia.

"This will enable consumer to make good decisions," he said. "The program integrates person information of enrollees and combines information they might be looking for that they could get on another Web site, but can get all they need on this one. What's new here is, it's all in one place. It's what people have been talking about for 20 years."

"It's amazing what this site can do," said Robert Zirkelbach, an official of the American's Health Insurance Plans trade group.

Among other things, the site allows users to shop for the best drug prices at pharmacies near their ZIP codes, tells consumers what medications cost and how much the insurance plan pays at each store. It also has algorithms that allow users to diagnose medical issues by symptom and estimate costs of solving the problem.