With its $8 billion acquisition of medical services provider Signify Health in the books, CVS Health is expanding its footprint into home health, CEO Karen Lynch said Wednesday at Axios' What's Next Summit.
Why it matters: CVS is among the retail giants in an arms race to add capabilities like primary care or telehealth across the health care continuum. It's vying with Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General and Walgreens, among others.
The pharmacy giant already owns Aetna, pharmacy benefit manager CVS-Caremark and health care service brands MinuteClinic and HealthHUB.
In January, CVS Health announced a plan to buy Oak Street Health, a primary care group focused on Medicare patients, for $10.5 billion.
What they're saying: "If you think about what's happening in health care today, people are accessing health care in various ways," Lynch told Axios’ Hope King.
"They're accessing it in the home. That's why Signify. We've seen primary care as an underutilized health care service. That's part of why we're extending into primary care with Oak Street. Technology is really the enabler."
Between the lines: Signify Health uses technology to support in-home care and service coordination for employers, physician groups, health systems and health plans. It has about 10,000 providers across all 50 states, Lynch said.
"One of the things they are able to see is what is going on in the home," Lynch said. That includes visibility of what kinds of foods patients stock in their refrigerators or whether there are household hazards that could increase the risk of a fall.
"How do we use the assets of CVS Health to make sure that they're taking the right meds? We can do pharmacy reconciliations," she said. "If they need follow-up care, we can recommend they go to a Minute Clinic. We can recommend if they need specialty infusions, we can bring our nurses in. If you think about our asset as a company, we can really improve their access and quality of care."
Be smart: CVS Health has its work cut out as it integrates Signify and Oak Street Health while tending to its other business segments, some of which are affected by declining COVID business, Evercore ISI analyst Elizabeth Anderson wrote in a note last month, noting the company has "lots of wood still to chop."
What to watch: Both the Signify deal and the Oak Street purchase are part of a focus on serving an aging population.
"If you look around the corner, there's a tsunami of aging Americans. There are more people today between the ages of 50 and 64 than there are in the Medicare population," Lynch said.
The bottom line: For a company that already owns one of the largest commercial health insurers and one of the largest PBMs, CVS is eyeing an even bigger piece of the demographic pie.
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday cleared the overdose reversal drug Narcan for sale without a prescription — a move health experts say could help slow a crisis that's claiming more than 100,000 lives a year.
Why it matters: Narcan acts five times quicker than the average arrival time for EMS technicians and can be administered without special training, allowing citizens to become de facto first responders.
Congress is moving to designate an animal tranquilizer that's infiltrating the illegal drug trade as a controlled substance, to better allow authorities to track it and prosecute traffickers.
Driving the news: Bipartisan legislation introduced Tuesday by Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reflects the growing alarm over the proliferation of xylazine, a sedative known as "tranq" or "zombie drug" that's often mixed with fentanyl, resists common overdose reversal treatments like naloxone and causes skin-rotting wounds.
Food and Drug Administration advisers will meet May 9 and 10 to weigh making a contraceptive pill available without a prescription for the first time.
Why it matters: Health experts say making birth control pills available over-the-counter will reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and could cut down on the need for abortions. But key questions remain over cost and whether insurers will cover them.
Little has been done within the Food and Drug Administration to prevent a repeat of last year's infant formula crisis, a former food safety official told a House oversight hearing on Tuesday.
Driving the news: While the direct blame falls on Abbott Laboratories for safety issues that took a key Michigan plant offline, failures by the FDA exacerbated the massive disruptions that ensued, Frank Yiannas, a former deputy commissioner of the FDA's Office of Food Policy and Response, told the House Oversight and Accountability health subcommittee.
State efforts to restrict gender-affirming care are moving beyond trans youth and increasingly focused on patients over the age of 18.
The big picture: Legislators in Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas have introduced bills barring health providers from offering care such as hormone treatments or surgery to people as old as 26.
Why it matters: This case represents theremaining significant legal avenue for abortion rights advocates to overturn Georgia's anti-abortion law, which is in effect and has been snarled in federal and state courts since 2019.
The Food and Drug Administration is eyeing policy changes that could make drugmakers conduct more stringent trials to win fast-track approvals of cancer drugs.
Why it matters: The agency's accelerated approval process has drawn fire for the way it allows manufacturers to launch products based on preliminary evidence and charge high prices before they complete trials.
The biggest public health insurance programs have become increasingly privatized over the last decade, even while politicians sparred over whether government-run health care should be expanded to cover more Americans.
Why it matters: Although privately run Medicare and Medicaid plans are still highly regulated and funded by the government, the commercialization has complicated efforts to rein in medical spending and unleashed fierce partisan fights like the ongoing one over Medicare Advantage.
As some states try to regulate children's social media use and TikTok emerges as a geopolitical chew toy, a new clearinghouse has emerged for mediating between tech companies and those concerned about their products' impact on kids: the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Why it matters: Young people live their lives on social media, and it's not going away — so parents and pediatricians need to learn to recognize when it becomes a problem, says pediatrician Michael Rich, the lab's founder.
While politicians in some states are working to limit gender-affirming care for transgender young people, Washington state's legislature is going in the opposite direction.
What's happening: This year, Washington lawmakers are trying to protect transgender patients — as well as doctors who practice here — from the reach of other states' laws that restrict gender-affirming health care for minors.
