Simplifying the Patient Health Care Experience

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.https://www.commonwealthfund.org/press-release/2016/new-survey-describes-scope-problem-five-national-health-care-foundations These challenges reinforce the importance of implementing consumer-driven care solutions. 

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.”

Solutions to Make Health Care Easier 

Through our combined assets, we can create a health care model that is more integrated, while offering consumers the ability to interact with trusted and familiar health care experts in their communities. By fully integrating Aetna's medical information and analytics with CVS Health’s pharmacy data, we will enable more effective, holistic treatment of the whole patient based on a more complete picture of their health. As a result, patients will benefit from earlier interventions and better connected care, leading to improved health outcomes and lower medical costs.  

Coordination across care teams, combined with expanded screening offerings and advanced connected devices, can help providers predict and prevent major health events before they occur. Take for example, identifying pre-diabetes symptoms or the warning signs of a heart attack. As a result of our end-to-end capabilities, this can be done by remotely monitoring key health vitals or ensuring patients with chronic diseases take their medications as prescribed, which can improve patient health and avoid costly adverse events.

Helping Patients Achieve Better Health 

Today, one in two Americans has at least one chronic illness. What’s more, nine out of 10 (91 percent) patients say they need more help with chronic disease management. Through our combined assets, we have the opportunity to help change that for patients living with costly and sometimes debilitating diseases.

As a first step, CVS Health will build on its successful Project Health screening events at locations nationwide and combine them with Aetna’s commitment to building healthier communities to offer new preventive health screenings locally. This community-based program aims to improve patients’ health outcomes through expanded preventive health screenings and support in the diagnosis, treatment and management of chronic diseases, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. 

CVS Health will work with local community partners to provide patients who are diagnosed for the first time with the follow up they need. To support these communities and newly-diagnosed patients, MinuteClinic locations will also be introducing expanded chronic care management services.

Merlo added that the coming together of CVS Health and Aetna presents many opportunities to change the way health care is provided for across our country.

“We'll probably have some really big wins in this, but I think the bigger opportunity is the cumulative value of all those little things that occur millions of times every day as we interact with our clients, their members, our customers, that will make a difference. And that purpose of helping people on their path to better health will remain our North Star.