Tag Archives: CVS Caremark

Retail Pharmacies As The Distribution Point For Information

October 7, 2013 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

It’s always exciting to be “right” in a prediction.  When I spoke at the CBI conference a few weeks ago, one of the key points I made was that today’s healthcare consumer is overwhelmed with information.  They get conflicting data.  They don’t have enough time with their physicians.  They are increasingly responsible for decisions and even with transparency, they don’t always know what to do.  With that in mind, one of my suggestions was that retail pharmacies had a great opportunity to step in and be this information management source for consumers.  (aka – The retailers can serve as the physical resource for the retailing of healthcare.)

With that in mind, I find the announcements by Walgreens and CVS very interesting.

From the CVS press release:

“Humana’s partnership with CVS/pharmacy reflects our proven and ongoing commitment to educate individuals and their families at the places they go when they have questions about their health,” said Roy A. Beveridge, MD, Humana’s Chief Medical Officer. “We’re working to ensure people develop a better understanding of how their health coverage can help them make better, and healthier, decisions.”

“Providing information about new health insurance coverage opportunities is in keeping with our purpose of helping people on their path to better health,” said Helena Foulkes, Executive Vice President and Chief Health Care Strategy and Marketing Officer for CVS Caremark. “We are pleased to combine our innovative suite of services and our new and existing relationships with organizations such as Humana to help patients understand and have access to information about insurance options in their community.

From the Walgreen’s press release:

Walgreens store personnel are directing individual customers who inquire to the GoHealth Marketplace, a resource where they can shop and compare health insurance plans, enroll and find other important tools and information. Consumers can access the GoHealth Marketplace online from www.walgreens.com/healthcarereform or via phone at 855-487-6969. Walgreens also is providing informational brochures and other materials in stores.

“As an accessible, community health care provider serving more than 6 million people each day, Walgreens can help connect those customers who may be considering new health insurance options with resources and information,” said Brad Fluegel, Walgreens senior vice president and chief strategy officer. “Our goal is to help ensure people fully understand the marketplace, and working with GoHealth, to provide personalized consultation from experts who can help them make informed decisions.”

In both cases, they may have addressed one of my questions about this strategy from my presentation which was how would they monetize this.  I think it’s the right role, but I wasn’t sure how it would lead to revenue other than general revenue related to store traffic.  I assume both of these have some “commission” or “referral fee” for traffic generated.

Consumerism, Healthcare, Innovation, PBM / Pharmacy, Politics, Value Propositions
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Walgreens Clinic Rebranding Is More Than A Name Change

July 30, 2013 by George Van Antwerp 2 Comments

As I talked about in my post about Walgreens and innovation, Walgreens has renamed their TakeCare Clinics to Healthcare Clinics at some locations.  This is more than just a meaningless name change.  This is the beginning of a business model change.  This is the shift from acute care to ongoing chronic disease management.  This is a big move that changes their place in the healthcare value chain.

It’s part of the overall strategy that has pulled them into the ACO space.

It will be interesting to see if CVS Caremark and their MinuteClinics follow them.  CVS Caremark already announced a different strategy in terms of providing advocates.  If I were them, I would jump fully into the remote monitoring / mHealth space and provide chronic disease management from a remote basis.  I think this would be different and innovative.

Walgreens Healthcare Clinics

Books / Articles, Care Management, Healthcare, Innovation, Leadership, mHealth, PBM / Pharmacy, Value Propositions
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Why CVS Caremark Asking For Your Weight Is Good For You

March 30, 2013 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

I continue to annoyed by all the fear-mongering in the industry around what CVS Caremark is “doing to their employees”.  What about focusing on how they are helping their employees to get better?  (If interested, you should read some of the information they have on their blog.)

Our “Plan for Health” combines an evolving, best-practice approach to health coverage with preventive care and wellness programs. Our colleagues will be more accountable for taking control of their health and associated costs. The first step is getting to know your numbers by getting a health screening and completing an online wellness review each year. If colleagues complete both by the May 1, 2013 deadline, they will avoid paying an additional $600 for the 2013-2014 plan year. (from the CVS Caremark blog)

I was hopeful to hear someone come out strongly and speak about it yesterday on CBS, but instead the CEO of Mercer just talked about “soft” programs that depend upon consumers being proactive around their health.  I would rather hear about the value of screenings and how it helps employees.  In talking with one friend of mine at a biometrics company, he told me that in one case almost 40% of the people that they identified with diabetes (or pre-diabetes) and hypertension (or pre-hypertension) didn’t know they had the disease (or were at high risk).  That to me is a valuable insight to the individual especially when coupled with a program to help them learn and manage their disease (or risk).

For example, companies for years have been using Health Risk Assessments (HRAs) to try to baseline employee health and use that to accomplish several things:

  1. Help the employee to understand their risks
  2. Identify people who should be in coaching programs to improve their health
  3. Learn about their population and how to improve their health benefits

Use of biometrics is the right evolution from the HRA.  People have tried HRAs for years with some success.  Companies pay as much as $600 for people to take this online survey that has no necessary link to reality.  Most HRAs aren’t linked to lab values.  Most HRAs aren’t linked to claims data.  Most HRAs don’t necessarily trigger enrollment in health programs.  They are supposed to activate the employee to be proactive which doesn’t work for many sick consumers especially those in the “pre-disease” phase.  (Here’s a good study that does show some increased activation.)

As I mentioned the other day, this use of biometrics and link between incentives and participation (and ultimately outcomes) is normal and will ultimately improve the link between the workplace and the employee around health.

Let’s take a broader look at insurance to help set some context:

  • For life insurance, you have to disclose certain data and depending on the policy level you have to do other things like get a physical and have blood work drawn.  That effects your costs and their underwriting.  
  • For car insurance, if you get in accidents, your costs go up.  In some case, you can have a monitoring device put on your car to lower your costs.  (like getting blood work done)
  • For home owners insurance, your costs go up if you live in a flood zone or a earthquake zone.  It also goes up if you have lots of claims.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we do determine a lot of our healthcare costs based on decisions we’ve made or had made for us since we were kids.  Some of these are conscious and some are subconscious.  And, obesity which is a large driver of many of these chronic conditions and has an impact on your likelihood of having cancer.  So, a company asking for your BMI and other data to help understand your risks for healthcare costs (of which they typically pick up 80%) doesn’t seem unusual.

Certainly, some are environmental such as those that live in “food deserts” like Detroit.  In other cases, workplace stress can affect our health.  We’re just starting to get smarter about “sitting disease” and it’s impact on our health.  Or, we may take medications that affect our blood pressure (for example).  It’s certainly important to understand these in context of your lab values and discuss a holistic strategy for improving your health with your physician and any care management resources which are provided to you (nurse, social worker, nutritionist, pharmacist).

This idea of learning more about employees in terms of biometrics, food, sleep, stress, social interaction, and many other data points is going to be more and more of a focus.  Companies want to learn how their employees do things.  They want to understand their health.  They want to improve their health.  They want to invest in their workforce to improve productivity, innovation, and ultimately job satisfaction.

While the glass half-empty people won’t see this and there are some companies that don’t always act this way, I generally believe that companies are trying to act in a way to increase their top line and most intelligent executives understand the correlation between health and wealth and the link between employee satisfaction and growth.

Ultimately, healthcare costs are estimated to put a $240,000 burden on us after we retire (even with Medicare) so if someone wants to help me become healthier and thereby save me money which improves my ability to retire and enjoy life I’m happy for them to do.

Books / Articles, Care Management, Healthcare, Leadership, Marketing / Communications, PBM / Pharmacy, Value Propositions
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CVS Caremark Adherence Study – Is Facebook The Solution To Adherence?

January 22, 2013 by George Van Antwerp 0 Comments

A new study funded by CVS Caremark as part of their ongoing research into medication adherence was recently published.

“Association Between Different Types of Social Support and Medication Adherence,” December 2012 issue of American Journal of Managed Care

In this, researchers reviewed 50 peer-reviewed articles about studies which directly measured the relationship between medication adherence and four categories of social support, including:

  • Structural support – marital status, living arrangements and size of the patient’s social network
  • Practical support – helping patients by paying for medications, picking up prescriptions, reading labels, filling pill boxes and providing transportation
  • Emotional support – providing encouragement and reassurance of worth, listening and providing spiritual support
  • Combination support – any combination of the three support structures detailed above

According to the study, greater practical support was more often linked to improved medication adherence, with 67 percent of the studies evaluating practical support finding a significant association between the support and medication adherence.

It drives some interesting questions as you dig into the actual research.  I sent several questions to Troyen A. Brennan, MD, MPH, who is the Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of CVS Caremark, and heads the research initiative that conducted the study.  Here are his responses:

1. How will this research change CVS Caremark’s approach to medication adherence such as your Adherence to Care program? 

CVS Caremark’s Adherence to Care program is all about engaging patients more consistently and directly to ensure they are following their medication regimes. We understand that our patients’ social networks and communication preferences are diverse, and we know that multi-dimensional interventions help to change behaviors. Given these factors, this research can be an important reference point as we develop new approaches to our adherence programs, challenging us to look beyond traditional engagement strategies in an effort to most effectively support patients on their path to better health. We are planning to test some interventions along these lines in 2013.  As a pharmacy innovation company, we want to make sure we are anticipating patient needs and remaining relevant to them especially given the changing face of social communication and networks.  

2.  The data points required to assess these support factors aren’t readily available in the eligibility file or claims file.  Are you collecting that data at the POS or during the enrollment process and using it in any way to determine the correct intervention cadence or level of effort at an individual level?

While this may not be the standard today, it is clear from the research that a patient’s social network and resulting support can be important factors in helping them take their medications as directed. This research can help us and others in the industry think about how best to incorporate new approaches to identify and leverage social networks for greater medication adherence.  For now, we will rely on POS as a way to collect this type of information.

 

  • 3.  To me, it appeared the data was less conclusive than I would like.  There were lots of conflicting data points and qualitative data.  Do you plan to refine this testing within your population to look at differences across disease states and relative to other factors?

 

This study relied on a comprehensive analysis of current literature linking medication adherence to social support networks – so we recognize that there are limitations in being able to draw concrete conclusions on certain factors, such as disease-specific conditions. Regardless, we still believe these findings – which look at clinical, peer-reviewed studies – contribute to the knowledge base in our field. As with all of the research we conduct, we challenge our teams to consider how we might be able to use the information to find practical supports for patients, while at the same time contributing to awareness about the implications of adherence on the broader health care landscape. The best way to understand this research is as hypothesis generating, which we can use in the design of real interventions that we can then test definitively in subsequent studies.

4.        Some of these social factors might be correlated with depression.  Was there any screening done to look at how depression as a co-morbidity might have affected adherence rates?

The methodology of this study relied on literature review and analysis of fifty peer-reviewed research articles which directly measured the relationship between medication adherence and forms of social support. A full review of the medical conditions associated with these studies can be found in Appendix 1. While depression, alone, was not one of the conditions featured in these studies, several did look at mental health conditions and the linkage between adherence and social networks. We did not however stratify by existence of depression—it may be a factor we have to take into account in future studies.

5.   The one thing that I read between the lines was the need for a caregiver strategy.  This has been missing in the industry for years.  Does CVS Caremark have an approach to engaging the caregivers?

 

Our study found that practical support such as picking up prescriptions, reading labels and filling pill boxes – all within the realm of a given caregiver’s role – were the most significant in driving greater adherence. Considering this finding, and acknowledging the role caretakers have in the lives of our patients, there is certainly space for us to develop solutions that engage caretakers more effectively. Recent analyses of “buddy” programs do suggest such interventions do work- -we just need to consider how to scale it.

 

  • 6.        With all this talk about social networks, it naturally leads you to a discussion about Facebook (or Google+).  Neither of them have big focuses in the healthcare space.  In your opinion, will these tools offer an intervention approach for changing behavior around medication or will that be occur at the disease community level in tools like PatientsLikeMe or CureTogether where there’s no social bond but a connectivity around disease? 

 

 The role of social media has changed the way we communicate and connect with one another dramatically over the past decade. What we can say, based on this particular study, is that the more practical the support, the more significant the impact on medication adherence. Perhaps further studies looking into solutions that effectively combine online/social media platforms to complement practical support would help clarify their impact on medication adherence.

If interested, here are some of their other presentations on adherence:

Books / Articles, Healthcare, PBM / Pharmacy, Press, Research, Social Media
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