Larry J. Merlo, President and CEO for CVS Health www.cvshealth.com formerly CVS Caremark, shared his thoughts at the National Press Club on September 19th on the intensive effort the company has made to evolve as an integrated healthcare company. To start off, he described how CVS Health actually works and how the healthcare and pharmacy systems are likely to work in the future.
According to Merlo, the company has more than 7,700 locations in the U.S, serves about five million customers each day, and in total, has treated more than 21 million patients. In addition, the company operates more than 900 retail medical clinics called Minute Clinics www.cvs.com/minuteclinic that are continuing to expand and it is expected that 1,500 clinics will be up and running by 2017. Over half of Minute Clinic’s services are offered at night or on weekends.
To help patients even more, CVS offers “Coram” www.coramhc.com, to provide infusion services treating more than 20,000 patients with treatments at home or at one of the ambulatory infusion sites. Plus, the company helps specialty patients who are often dealing with multiple and complex diseases by offering “Accordant Case Management Services” www.accordant.net/casemanagement.shtml to focus on whole patient care.
As Merlo pointed out, “One of the biggest challenges facing our healthcare system is the increasing prevalence of chronic disease. Today, half of all Americans suffer from one or more chronic diseases and this is expected to continue to rise for the next 20 years.”
He expects chronic disease to become more prevalent with the expected tremendous growth in Medicare to be driven in large part by what is called the “Silver Tsunami”. The fact is that there are 10,000 baby boomers becoming eligible for Medicare every day. This means that over 16 million new people will become Medicare eligible by 2019 resulting in even more demand for services and medications.
Unfortunately, one out of three patients with chronic disease staring on a maintenance prescription program decides to discontinue treatment before their first refill is even due. Less than one half of patients take their doses as prescribed by their physician. Plus three out of four people will stop taking medications within the first year of beginning therapy for a newly diagnosed disease.
The CVS “Pharmacy Advisor” Program www.caremark.com/wps/portal/specialty_Pharmacy is a solution to help people improve compliance to medications and do a better job of managing their chronic disease. The program connects patients with pharmacists who provide phone counseling, email reminders, in store counseling, and sometimes home consultations for some of the more complex cases.
Another program called “Specialty Connect” www.info.cvscaremark.com/our-businesses/pharmacy-advisor offers the patient the option of getting prescriptions by mail or through a new option where they can drop off and pick up their specialty prescriptions at any CVS Pharmacy.
Finally, there is a focus on digital innovation. CVS is using connected health tools to make it possible for customers with both retail and mail prescriptions to have an integrated view of their medications and be able to refill or even transfer prescriptions between retail and mail channels.
Merlo added, “Features recently have been added to the mobile app. So today, customers can scan refills, check drug interactions, and in the next few months, additional tools will be added. A virtual pillbox will be introduced that will help provide daily reminders to help patients and caregivers actually track medication adherence.