Our world-class providers will see you now

Jon Thiboutot, President, Retail Health, highlights how MinuteClinic’s in-person and virtual care are making primary and acute care faster, simpler and more connected for patients. 

• Retail Health is tackling the country’s increasing provider shortage by expanding MinuteClinic’s omnichannel care model, which offers scheduled and walk-in appointments the same day, 24/7 virtual visits in minutes and, in the near future, a chat option in seconds, Jon says. 

 

• MinuteClinic has also begun expanding into primary care for preventive care and chronic condition management through our existing clinics and health system and payer partnerships. 

 

• “While quality is foundational to all of this, this really is the fastest and easiest way to get treated in America,” Jon says, noting that MinuteClinic providers often receive a Net Promoter Score of 80-100, an industry-leading patient satisfaction score.

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Host

Matt McGuire

A lifelong writer, editor and content strategist. Senior Manager, Enterprise Communications, CVS Health

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.

Health care is experiencing a period of rapid transformation, driven by rising patient expectations, workforce challenges, increasing pressure to deliver accessible, affordable care and innovation fueled by the advent of AI.

Patients today want convenience, speed and transparency. They’re no longer willing to wait weeks or months for an appointment or navigate fragmented systems to get the care they need. These shifts are reshaping how care must be delivered.

On this episode of Big Questions Answered, we’ll learn how Retail Health, which includes MinuteClinic and CVS Virtual Care, is addressing these changes by making it easier for patients to receive care, innovating to improve the patient and provider experience and expanding into primary care and chronic condition management.

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.

Jon Thiboutot is our guest this month. He is the President of Retail Health, and a Senior Vice President at CVS Health.

In his role with the company, he is advancing Retail Health’s business strategy, which includes delivering convenient, affordable everyday care through MinuteClinic and Virtual Care, which brings care closer to where people live, shop and manage their health.

Jon, thanks for stopping by.

Jon Thiboutot
Thanks, Matt. Great to be here.

Matt McGuire
So, Jon, at Retail Health, you spent a few years as Vice President of Operations, and you began leading the business as its president in September. Since stepping into this role, what have become your main priorities?

Jon Thiboutot
Yeah, and prior to coming to Retail Health, I spent more than two decades at our retail pharmacy business in field and central operations, and, as you mentioned, leading ops at MinuteClinic, so I clearly come to our business with a strong operational background — think about process, routines, discipline. So, while we're clearly thinking about the future, thinking about innovation, before you can drive new growth channels, you really need a strong foundation to build off of. So, as I reflect on my first 90 days, there was an intense focus on the fundamentals, and in many ways, an honest reflection of where do we have strong performance, where do we have reliability, where are we executing really well and then where were we not, where did we have gaps? So, I would put our efforts in mainly three places.

One, people. And this is really the basics of running a business as you think about staffing, scheduling. One thing that we were seeing is that we were closing clinics far too often due to staffing issues. And if you think about the impact that has on the community in terms of trust and reliability, we knew that we needed to do better. And we wasted no time, stood up a staffing blitz, working with our talent acquisition partners, HR partners, our field teams to attract and retain talent. And the good news is, we'll be at full roster in the coming weeks.

The second was related to access to care. Another thing that we were seeing is that only half of our patients that were raising their hand looking for care were able to find the care that they needed. So, think about patients that are scheduling digitally from their couch, patients that were walking into the clinic. Far too often, for a variety of reasons, they weren't able to find the care that they needed. And this was an immediate problem that we needed to solve.

And then the third was related to field structure in routine. So we know that our field leaders are most successful when the majority of their time, 75-80% of their work week is in our stores, in our clinics, working shoulder to shoulder with our frontline colleagues, helping to coach, reinforce, remove barriers. And we realized that in recent years, far too many blockers had crept in and got in the way. So, we needed to reset, remove those blockers, and be able to give our field leaders the mental and physical space that they needed to be able to be more often and more consistently present in the stores.

So, in terms of outcomes that we were looking to drive, one, it was be open and be reliable in the community. And while we still have room to improve, our open rate as we stand today has never been better. The second was get patients the care that they're looking for. And this is really exciting, cool tech in digital enhancements in flight and recently delivered that are converting demand at a much higher rate. And then the third was unlock the potential of a high performing field structure and culture. And I think that last word is really important because underpinning all of this in many ways is culture. So, continuing to strengthen our culture and be an employer of choice as we think about our frontline workforce,
which is our APPs, our advanced practice providers. Those are the nurse practitioners and physician associates that work in our clinics and foster a team environment that supports collaboration, accountability, community. But again, all thinking about building a rock solid, strong foundation and infrastructure that can act as a catalyst for transformational near-term and long-term growth.

Matt McGuire
Well, that is an impressive list you've put together. And you said access to care — getting patients the care they’re looking for. That is one of your key priorities, and it’s also one of the company’s. How is MinuteClinic improving access to care in a meaningful way for patients?

Jon Thiboutot
Patients more than ever are really in the driver's seat and rightfully so. They have high expectations and low tolerance for friction. And as you think about some of the emerging trends, patients are increasingly using AI chatbots as the front door of health care.
I've used them personally. You probably use them. I think Claude knows more about me than my own doctor. Patients have lots of options. As you think about urgent care, virtual care, telehealth, adoption and quite frankly, preference is increasing. The direct to consumer and lifestyle market is really taking off. So, as you think about services like men's health, women's health, hair loss, weight loss and even patients willing to go off benefit and pay cash for specialized and personalized health care, we're really thinking about consumer expectations, how we continue to evolve, and meeting patients where they are in their health care journey.

Access and cost transparency continues to be a significant factor in what patients are looking for. And I'm actually really proud of our team in that we agonize over every detail in the patient journey. So, think about the digital flow and the experience most folks are familiar with opening up their phone or going on their desktop. Think about that digital flow and how you look for care. We think about the screen flows. What makes sense to present to the consumer or the patient in what order? Do we show them the map first or the list first? How do the buttons present? What words are on the button? And where are we inadvertently introducing friction? And we get consumer feedback, we optimize and then we repeat, really through the lens of optimization being a journey, not a destination.

I think the other thing that's really relevant is this concept of an omnichannel experience. And in the context of health care, simply put, it's ensuring that a patient gets the same seamless experience, regardless of how they personally want to receive care. How that translates to the consumer experience at MinuteClinic and Retail Health is ultimately in the optionality that we provide. So, if a patient wants to be seen in person, we give them the option to schedule or just walk in, and we have the tech innovations to allow us to balance the two, but it's really up to the consumer. If a patient's preference is virtual care, then we can connect them with a virtual provider immediately, within minutes or allow them to schedule an appointment. And then very soon, we'll have capabilities such as chat, which is a new function and capabilities that is becoming increasingly important to the consumer. We also call this asynchronous care. So, think about simple to treat conditions like urinary tract infection, pink eye, medication refills.

So, if you sum up the omnichannel optionality here, our value prop is really compelling. So, you can get a chat visit in seconds, a virtual care visit in minutes, urgent care same day. And I know we're gonna get into primary care in a minute. If you need primary care, we can get you connected with a primary care provider within 24 hours. And clearly, while quality is foundational to all of this, this really is the fastest and easiest way to get treated in America, reflects our unique capabilities, and we really are creating an experience that very few can replicate.

And lastly, you can't talk about consumer expectations without mentioning NPS, Net Promoter Score, which is standard measure by which we assess the consumer experience, I guess more specifically the likelihood to recommend, which it's really important in the industry, it's really important to us. And for context, an NPS score of 50 or more in health care would be considered world-class performance. At MinuteClinic, we are consistently in the 80s, and it's not uncommon for one of our providers in our clinic to be consistently 100, which is the highest score that you can achieve.

Matt McGuire
Yeah, that’s impressive. So, anywhere between 80 and 100 puts a clinician in that top NPS category, which translates to excellent, so that’s something to celebrate. And another thing to celebrate is MinuteClinic’s anniversary — 25 years. During that time, it’s mostly been known for providing quick care for minor illnesses and injuries. But it's evolved a lot during that stretch. How is MinuteClinic serving patients differently today?

Jon Thiboutot
While MinuteClinic's been in service for 25 years, it's been part of the CVS family for 20 years. This year's our 20th anniversary, which is an exciting milestone. And business has come a long way over the last several years. When we first started, our slogan was, You're Sick, We're Quick, I think, emphasizing the accessibility and convenience of the business.

And in the last several years, we invested significantly in expanding the capabilities of our APP workforce. And thinking about the work and the type of care that they can provide. Currently, we provide a wide breadth of services, expanding well beyond, I think, how folks have traditionally thought about us as being minor illness, minor injury, vaccines, really extending into chronic care therapy, prevention. So, if you think about the major chronic diseases like hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, our providers are well-trained, well-equipped to provide a wide breadth of services and committed to delivering comprehensive, consistent care.

We also leverage Epic, which is the dominant EHR, electronic health record, in the industry, which really helps coordinate care. And as we think about widening the aperture of what we can do, this really allows us to focus on addressing unmet chronic care needs, helping patients identifying closed care gaps and vaccine gaps. And what we've also leaned into is supporting longer term patient relationships, not just one time visits. We call this longitudinal care, as well as thinking about where the industry is shifting. So, as I mentioned before, as you think about lifestyle services, direct to consumer services and something that I'm really proud of is our existing weight loss program. It's a rapidly growing market. And today, this is a high-quality experience with one of our providers. Eighty-five percent of patients lose weight within three months. And we continue to make significant investments in this space.

So, to sum that up, we're building off our core strength of acute care while expanding into preventative and chronic care therapy, while at the same time really building and thinking about the future of our practice and where we want to be one year from now, two years from now.

Matt McGuire
As a patient and as a CVS Health employee, it’s been really impressive to see this growth take place. And, so MinuteClinic started transforming to this primary care model in 2024. How has it grown since then?

Jon Thiboutot
Well, we've all seen the primary care stats. One in three Americans don't have a primary care provider. There's a projected shortage of nearly 70,000 PCPs by 2036. And the average wait time is nearly 30 days to get in and see a primary care provider. In some parts of the country, it's much longer than that, as you think about rural parts of the United States. And we really wanted to be part of that solution. We knew that we had the capabilities to be able to lean into this space. And it was just a natural next step in our evolution. Our journey started in 2024. And since then, we now have 65% of our MinuteClinic fleet now offering adult primary care in 16 states. And it's worth noting that an important part of our primary care journey is partnerships with health systems, something we call CINs, clinically integrated networks. And we currently have 5 CIN partnerships with health systems across the US — Emory Health Care in Georgia, Fairview in Minnesota, Rush Health in Illinois, Ohio Health, and then just recently a new partnership with Hartford Health Care in Connecticut.

Why this is important is that these partnerships allow us to expand access in these states to our high-quality primary and preventative care services. And we know that research clearly shows convenient primary care leads to better health outcomes, fewer ER visits, lower overall health care costs. And since launching in August of 2024, most of our appointments have been same day or next day. And that's probably worth repeating and saying again, right? Think about in an environment where the average wait time is nearly 30 days, you can come to MinuteClinic Primary Care and get a primary care visit same day or next day. I mean, that's just a compelling opportunity and access for patients in the communities that we serve and their ability to get in and see a primary care provider. Strong patient enrollment and satisfaction.

I talked about our overall MinuteClinic NPS scores within our primary care practice. It's actually in the high 80s. Meaningful progress in closing gaps in care. And ultimately, this translates to faster access and access closer to home because our CVS and MinuteClinic locations, they're where people live. Sixty percent of new primary care patients return for a wellness exam within 6 to 8 weeks, and 15% of our eligible acute care patients decide to opt into our primary care practice. So it's been a really exciting time and personally and professionally rewarding to be part of this journey.

Matt McGuire
It's great to hear how MinuteClinic is really meeting this need. So, this wouldn't be a proper conversation if we didn't talk about artificial intelligence. Can you tell me, Jon, how is Retail Health adopting and using AI?

Jon Thiboutot
Yes, comes up a lot and rightfully so. I think about it in a couple different dimensions.

One is the consumer experience. So how do we ensure that we're helping the consumer navigate to the care that they need in the most friction-free way possible. So we talked about front door. We talked about guided care. But how do we tie together the consumer need to the channel of care that is most appropriate? And then the other thing that is unique to our business, whether it's the in-person aspect of our business or the virtual care, is that we lack a traditional front desk individual. So, you think about the functions that a front desk person would play in a doctor's office. How do we lean in with AI and replicate some of those same functions as we think about insurance navigation, help with scheduling and follow up, et cetera.

The second bucket is really around the provider experience. So, think about our frontline colleagues, our NPs, our PAs, how do we reduce the administrative burden as we think about things like documentation, encoding, assisted clinical decision making, I think assisted is the key word, not replaced clinical decision making, but assisted. And we've seen already the benefit of things like ambient listening tools, automated documentation and encoding tools.

I would say the third big bucket is something I call P&L optimization. So how do we improve our ability to capture revenue? For businesses that depend on medical billing, there's a challenge that we have as we think about revenue earned but not captured. So there's a tremendous opportunity and something we call rev cycle management. And that's just really looking at the end-to-end patient journey from a payment and collection perspective. So, pre-visit, how do we make sure that we're collecting someone's insurance, we're running real-time eligibility, we're being able to get ahead of things like out-of-network issues, intra-visit during the visit. It's what I mentioned, focusing on the documentation and coding challenge, and then post-visit, how do we resolve things like unbilled claims and denials? So, there's a tremendous opportunity there where we think AI can fill a need and help provide value.

Within that also are things like cost mitigation and how do we drive automation to take costs out of our model? And then also, there's this concept of forensic analysis on our operations and financials. And, you know, as we work to ensure that each of our clinics is profitable, at times, the driver or variable impacting the clinic sits too far below the surface. And we've seen AI automate some of that deep forensic research into the P&L, into the operational data and help surface and bring to light in an actionable way the things that would take us normally hours, days, weeks to uncover and serve up in a way that that allows us to take meaningful action and drive improvements.

Matt McGuire
So, Jon, to close things out, you've spent more than 25 years at CVS Health, starting as a pharmacy intern and then growing into your current role. When you reflect on your journey at the company, what are you most proud of?

Jon Thiboutot
Yeah, I am. I just celebrated 25 years in February, and I started in our stores. My first job ever was ringing the register in the pharmacy. And what's kind of neat is that the CVS I started at in Fall River, Massachusetts, there's two pharmacists and two techs that are still there 25 years later. And just the other day, one of them sent me a photo from right about the time when I started, which was fun to reflect on.

There's several marquee experiences that I think stands out in everyone's career. For me, there's three that come to mind. Early in my career, I had the opportunity to play a lead role, modernizing and rebuilding our pharmacy workflow. So as you can imagine, innovating on the workflow and technology that 9,000 pharmacies and 100,000-plus colleagues were going to use to be able to support 90 million Americans was pretty cool.

The second was, as part of the pandemic response, operationalizing access to the new COVID vaccine that had just become available. For six months, we were working six days a week, 12 hours a day, one of the hardest things that we ever did, but I wouldn't change a thing. It was so purpose driven. The bond that you form with the people that you're working with, you know, and when you're on that kind of a mission that's having that kind of an impact at a time that was very scary for the country was just so rewarding.

And then I think the third is what we're here talking about today, being able to transform one of the largest ambulatory care practices in the country to one of the largest primary care practices and be part of the national response to the primary care shortage, for me, it's just incredibly rewarding. And these are the experiences that you never forget. You grow tremendously through these. You learn a lot. You form really strong bonds with the people that you work with. So, when I think about 25 years and I've been doing some reflecting, those are the things that I think about.

Matt McGuire
Jon, those are some landmark moments. Thank you for sharing those. And thank you for this conversation. I really had a great time talking with you today.

Jon Thiboutot
You bet, Matt. Great to be here.

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.