CVS Health's chief medical officer, Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, put forward the view on Friday that expanding the role of pharmacists across the company's roughly 9,000 retail locations in chronic disease management could broaden both access to care and its affordability, with patients better positioned to monitor their own health indicators.
Across the United States, heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, diabetes, and related chronic illnesses claim millions of lives annually — conditions that available treatments and appropriate medications can address. Compton-Phillips noted that the company is exploring ways to draw pharmacists further into patient care, including having them take blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar readings, with the aim of making it straightforward for people to track their health numbers.
CVS has chosen to test the approach through a five-store trial run in Michigan. Across the United States, what pharmacists are permitted to do varies from one state to the next, shaped by each state's own pharmacy laws.
CVS Health operates three distinct business lines under its umbrella: Aetna on the insurance side, CVS Caremark handling pharmacy benefits, and a chain of retail drugstores spread across the country, making it one of the larger players in American healthcare.
At a Total Health conference held in Nashville, Compton-Phillips disclosed that the organisation had entered into discussions with the federal Medicare agency regarding how pharmacists might broaden patient access to care while helping to bring down treatment costs.
Bringing down out-of-pocket expenses for the roughly 70 million people covered under Medicare — a federal health programme serving adults 65 and older as well as those living with disabilities — sits among the stated priorities of the current administration, which has launched a series of pilot programmes aimed at testing ways to reduce those costs. Among the pilots being tested is one that broadens access to GLP-1 drugs — a class of weight-loss treatments drawing strong patient demand — priced at $50 per month on a temporary basis through TrumpRx.gov.
Survey data gathered recently points to a growing number of employers planning to drop workplace coverage of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs — including Mounjaro, Zepbound, Ozempic, and Wegovy, made by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk respectively — from their health plans by 2027, driven by the rising expense those treatments place on benefit budgets. Retail prices listed on pharmaceutical manufacturers' own websites place those drugs at a few hundred dollars, yet employers who include them in workplace health coverage may face higher costs through the insurance channel.
Compton-Phillips expressed support for expanding access to GLP-1 medications at reduced cost, noting that the drugs carry what she termed "incredible" health potential and stating that their therapeutic value is well established.
