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After just six months on the job, Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, EVP, Chief Medical Officer, is convinced CVS Health can make a genuine difference in the health care ecosystem.
• The company has the assets it needs — an insurance provider, a pharmacy benefit manager, health care providers and pharmacies — to restore trust in health care, Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips says.
• Innovation is change at scale, like when the company enables pharmacists with AI to enhance patient safety or adds primary care services to MinuteClinic locations to address unmet preventive health care needs, she says.
• “We're actually going to deliver on the promise of being the trusted organization that succeeds in simplifying health care,” Dr. Compton-Phillips says.
• The company has the assets it needs — an insurance provider, a pharmacy benefit manager, health care providers and pharmacies — to restore trust in health care, Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips says.
• Innovation is change at scale, like when the company enables pharmacists with AI to enhance patient safety or adds primary care services to MinuteClinic locations to address unmet preventive health care needs, she says.
• “We're actually going to deliver on the promise of being the trusted organization that succeeds in simplifying health care,” Dr. Compton-Phillips says.
Creators and Guests
What is Big Questions Answered?
Big Questions Answered helps us understand important CVS Health initiatives by taking a closer look at new products, powerful innovations and the big changes the company is making to achieve its strategic imperatives and build a world of health around every consumer. The company's senior leaders answer big questions from host Matt McGuire.
CVS Health is committed to growth and innovation, and that commitment is transforming health care today. It’s empowering people to prioritize preventive care, expanding access to mental health services, pioneering new ways to deliver essential medications and more.
On this episode of Big Questions Answered, we’ll learn about the many ways CVS Health is innovating, why it’s important to simplify the complex patient journey and how the company’s integrated model is driving down costs and improving patient satisfaction.
Welcome to Big Questions Answered, a podcast that helps us understand the important initiatives at CVS Health. I’m Matt McGuire from the Enterprise Communications team. I’ll be your host as we dive into the latest developments, breakthroughs and innovations that are helping us achieve our ambition to become America’s most trusted health care company. Thanks for joining me today as we get our big questions answered.
I’m excited to welcome Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips. She’s the Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at CVS Health. She leads our company’s clinical strategy and Medical Affairs organization, with a focus on delivering high-quality, accessible care and improving health outcomes across the CVS Health enterprise and its assets. She joined us in April and has more than 30 years of clinical and operational experience. Dr. Compton-Phillips, thanks for stopping by.
Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips
It is my pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me, Matt.
Matt McGuire
So, Dr. Compton-Phillips, you’ve held a number of roles in the health care industry throughout your career — clinician, administrator, author, commentator. And these roles have given you a holistic perspective on the industry. I’m curious, since joining CVS Health earlier this year, what is your impression of the company?
Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips
I have been so impressed by and just feel so lucky to be part of CVS Health because, I think, what I've seen is the will, the ability, the ideas and the capacity to execute on making a difference in the health care ecosystem today. That for any of us who have been through or who've had friends and family who've been through any kind of health perturbation, it's really hard. It's complicated, it's unsettling. You don't know who is going to connect with who, and the cost of anything, and are you actually going to be able to get seen when you need to get seen, or are there hurdles you're going to have to go through? And because of that unsettled nature of health care, people have lost trust in the health care ecosystem.
And CVS Health has recognized the fact that all those layers of complexity erode trust, and that we have the ability to do something about it. We own the assets, we have, we have the coverage, we have the health care delivery, we have the pharmacy, we have the pharmacy benefit manager that can allow us to change the way we put those pieces together, changing the outcomes for the patients, the consumers and the members that we serve.
So, that's why I'm excited to be here, and I've actually seen it in action. I've seen people roll up their sleeves and figure out how to get the right medication to the right patient at the right cost at the right time. I've seen them figure out how to identify at Aetna that women who, after having a baby, haven't been screened for depression as they should be. And then, well, hey, we have health care delivery, let's train up nurse practitioners in MinuteClinic to be able to take care of these patients. So, we used one asset to identify a need. We used another asset to deliver a solution, and we can do that because we're integrated across our ecosystem and we have the will and the ideas and the capacity to do something about it.
Matt McGuire
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I'm really happy to hear you talk about trust because our new ambition is to be America's most trusted health care company and our new purpose is to simplify health care. So, I'm curious, what innovative approaches is CVS Health taking to simplify complex patient journeys and build trust, especially in areas where health care has traditionally been fragmented?
Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips
Well, you know, I just talked about one. We have said, we have 9,000 access points through our pharmacies. What can we do to leverage these access points to help be able to enable solutions? And that's how we ended up with MinuteClinic and identifying that behavioral health was a need we needed to put in in addition to urgent care and primary care and so started leveraging MinuteClinic to do behavioral health care. But then we said, “Oh, you know what, like, even those 9,000 access points or the 900 that contain MinuteClinics might be insufficient. Can we do it virtually?” And we enabled behavioral health care virtually.
And I think it's what we're trying to do across the enterprise with everything from coming up with care pathways to doing a better job for seniors and Oak Street Health, to leveraging our clinical pharmacists to not just dispense medications, but to actually do things like medication reconciliation and help with prevention services.
All those things take the goal that we're going to simplify what it takes for patients to actually get the health that they need and deserve. So, I think the fact that we have this vision to build trust and to simplify, opens up the possibility of our people to do what they came to health care to do, which is to make lives better.
Matt McGuire
So, Dr. Compton-Phillips, the health care industry is full of start-ups and disruptors who say, “We can do something different.” I'm wondering, how are we, as a large-scale incumbent player, leveraging our unique, integrated model to drive down costs and improve patient satisfaction?
Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips
You know, before coming to CVS, I worked with a lot of those disruptive start-ups, and they are full of great ideas and niche solutions that for a mere price of something, we'll do this one little piece of health care, which is great. And I love the enthusiasm, and I love the vision. But the Institute for Healthcare Improvement used to say that innovation is actually change at scale. Innovation just isn't some new gizmo that happens, but it's how do you change at scale. And something that I think CVS brings to the table is the will and the capacity to change at scale. And, so, that if we decide to do something, for example, a decade ago we took tobacco out of our stores at significant cost to the revenue stream, right? Like you make money selling tobacco, but we knew that the right thing to do was to take tobacco out of our stores, make it more filled with friction for consumers to get tobacco. And you know what happened? Is people smoked less in the areas around the stores where we took tobacco out, which is great. It's actually a sign that we're willing to put our money where our words are that we want to improve health — that we want to simplify health care. So, I think that that in this era of AI enabled care and technology enabled care that we can actually start doing the embedding AI into the way we do things to really get at taking some of the friction out of the ecosystem.
I mean, I think about what our pharmacists are doing now enabled by AI that really help increase the safety and efficiency to be able to get consumers the medications that they need, right? That's change at scale. For us to be able to do things like offering tools like counsel on our website where you can get text enabled health care? That's change at scale. For us to get supportive care within health care delivery, including, like, changing over our MinuteClinics to be able to provide primary care in areas that have way insufficient primary care practices. Again, change at scale. We're the largest primary care practice in the country.
So, I think the fact that we have the desire to change health care, and we have the will to change health care, and we have the capacity to do it, gives us the right to use a word that that my friend and colleague Tilak Mandadi calls being an “incurgent,” a disruptive insurgent. I probably have the portmanteau a little bit messed up there, but you get the concept that, like, we are disrupting ourselves. We're willing to disrupt ourselves by actually doing the hard work to change the way we do things.
Matt McGuire
Yeah, that's great. So, you know, we're kind of closing out 2025 in the next couple of weeks. I'm curious, looking ahead, what is your vision for how CVS Health will continue to drive growth and innovation in the next two to three years? And what major shifts in the health care landscape do you kind of anticipate will influence this strategic direction?
Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips
I think, right now, if you take a bird's eye view, health care spend in the U.S. is about 1-1/2 times the next highest country, right? We're very expensive. About a third of the dollars go to hospitals, about a third of the dollars go to doctors and about a third of the dollars go to medications. If we continue down the path, and I believe it is the path we're going to continue down, of value-based care, we're going to be shifting those dollars into communities so that people stay healthy and well. And we actually work to keep them healthy and well so that they don't have to need a hospital as often. By doing that, by focusing on better prevention, by better care closer to where people live, work and play. We are going to simplify health care. We are going to make it so that people stay healthy and well longer. We are going to deliver better value for the population that we serve. And we will start restoring the trust that the health care system is aligned with the goals, values and beliefs of the people of the country. And so that's where I see us going. I think we're actually going to deliver on the promise of being the trusted organization that succeeds in simplifying health care.
Matt McGuire
I’m on board with that. Dr. Compton-Phillips, this has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate you stopping by today. Thank you very much.
Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight.
Matt McGuire
And a big thanks to you for tuning in to this episode. Until next time, I'm Matt McGuire. I look forward to joining you again to get more big questions answered.