CVS CEO: COVID Testing Sites Validate HealthHUB Strategy

May 11

Since acquiring Aetna, CVS Health Corp. has touted its HealthHUB stores — which include expanded clinics, labs for health screening, and space for wellness pursuits like yoga — as the linchpin of its plan to stand out among other large, diversified firms that include a health insurer. Yet as one analyst pointed out during CVS’s first-quarter 2020 earnings call on May 6, that strategy could face new challenges amid the COVID-19 pandemic, “a time where the entire world is rethinking how much time they want to spend outside their house.”

CVS executives said that while the company is indeed seeing less foot traffic at its brick-and-mortar locations, it is still leveraging the power of having a vast retail footprint by offering testing for the new coronavirus — a use case that could persist long after the current public health crisis. As CEO Larry Merlo put it: “We’re focused on COVID testing today, but there is a broader universe of diagnostics and monitoring that we see becoming an important part of our HealthHUB strategy.”

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Health Plan Weekly

Leslie Small

Leslie has been working in journalism since 2009 and reporting on the health care industry since 2014. She has covered the many ups and downs of the Affordable Care Act exchanges, the failed health insurer mega-mergers, and hundreds of other storylines spanning subjects such as Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage, employer-sponsored insurance, and prescription drug coverage. As the managing editor of Health Plan Weekly and Radar on Drug Benefits, she writes and edits for both publications while overseeing a small team of reporters who also focus on the managed care sector. Before joining AIS Health, she was a senior editor for the e-newsletter Fierce Health Payer, and she started her career as a copy editor at multiple local newspapers. She graduated with a dual degree in journalism and political science from Penn State University.

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