For many Americans, health care can be difficult to navigate. At a time when chronic disease continues to grow in prevalence and impact in the U.S., patients are also facing complexities and fragmentation when seeking the right care. In fact, research shows that patients with an ongoing medical condition struggle to get the coordinated care and health services they need to avoid costly hospital visits.
CVS Health and Aetna share the vision of transforming the consumer health care experience. As a newly-combined company, we’re focused on putting the patient at the center of their health care delivery. The combination of Aetna's data-driven insights and the convenience of CVS Health's community-based retail health care and digital tools helps provide a more personalized health care experience that enables highly-coordinated care and empowers patients to achieve better health outcomes.
“New ways of identifying and engaging patients to drive beneficial behavior changes will be critical to lowering medical costs for patients and payors, and Aetna’s history of innovation and expertise helps the combined company accomplish this,” says Karen Lynch, Executive Vice President of CVS Health and President for the Aetna business unit. “Patients will benefit from earlier interventions and more connected care, leading to better health outcomes and lower medical costs. And Aetna’s expertise in designing innovative health plans will help our combined company establish lower cost models of care, which will be crucial given the inevitable shift to value-based care.”
Enabling Highly-Coordinated Care
Patients deserve and want a more coordinated health care system. In fact, a recent CVS Health poll conducted by Morning Consult found that 84 percent of Americans believe it is important for their doctors to utilize technology to communicate among other care providers, including pharmacists and retail health practitioners — demonstrating the need to make our health care system better connected and easier to use.
“We have a health care system that has become way too complicated. It is difficult to access services in many cases. At the same time, the costs associated with health care continues to rise at an unsustainable pace,” says Larry Merlo, President and CEO of CVS Health. “We believe that with CVS Health and Aetna coming together we can introduce new products and services that will bring solutions to the challenges and frustrations that consumers face every day. That means transforming what has become a very complex system and making it simpler. Making health care local. And helping people achieve their best health at a lower cost.”