CVS Health and Microsoft Corp. are partnering to “reimagine personalized care” and accelerate digital efforts at the large U.S. drugstore chain and its healthcare businesses.
The five-year partnership, explained Thursday at the 2021 Forbes Healthcare Summit by CVS Health chief executive Karen Lynch and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, will use the massive data CVS has from its tens of millions of customers and health plan enrollees. Financial terms of the relationship weren’t disclosed.
CVS and Microsoft hope the partnership will deliver more “customized health recommendations” through the collaboration “when and where” customers need them such as mobile alerts for cancer screenings or reminders to buy sunscreen for people at risk for Melanoma skin cancer.
“It’s really about that mobility about having your health information available at your fingertips and allowing us as a company to be a part of your digital health,” CVS Health chief executive Karen Lynch said during an interview with Forbes editor-in-chief Steve Forbes.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the partnership’s “not about the technology we bring” from Microsoft to CVS. Rather, Nadella said it’s about the “technology (Microsoft) brings to help CVS build their own technology.”RECOMMENDED FOR YOU1Trust The AI? You DecideMore stories like thisFewer stories like this2VC Firm 11.2 Capital Raises $101 Million To Back More ‘Deep Tech’ Companies Like Ginkgo Bioworks And Hinge HealthMore stories like thisFewer stories like this3Marker Learning Raises $4 Million To Make Learning Disability Testing More AccessibleMore stories like thisFewer stories like this
Other impacts that could benefit patients could be from improved adherence to medications given statistics show people are known to forget to take their prescriptions or don’t take them regularly as directed. “Adherence can lead to better outcomes,” Nadella said.
Here are some key goals of the CVS-Microsoft partnership, the companies announced Thursday:
· Customize care to accelerate CVS Health’s “data-driven, personalized customer experience” while complying with patient confidentiality.
· Enable front line workers given employees will be able to use Microsoft Teams to “make store operations more agile and connected, improving the customer experience.”
· Digitalize operations, leverage Microsoft’s Azure cognitive services like “Computer Vision” and “Text Analytics for Health,” which automate tasks. CVS and Microsoft cited specialty pharmacy as an example where CVS “has digitized intake using these services – including the 40 percent of prescriptions that arrive as paper or fax – helping technicians fill prescriptions, faster and easier than previous methods.”
· Cloud computing services will be used to accelerate CVS Health’s “digital transformation by migrating business applications currently running on on-site servers to Azure, advancing operational efficiencies and increasing speed and agility across the company.”