Retailers such as CVS Health are actively trying to leverage Several ways to reach consumers directly, whether at home or through primary care, whether virtually or eventually in person in the future. A shrewd observer of the field sees these moves as both offensive and defensive.
The company is looking to acquire the Dallas-based indicate healtha home healthcare tech startup, sources told Wall Street Journal on Monday.The news comes after Amazon’s $3.9 billion Buy Primary care company One Medical.
Signify uses technology and data to help health plans, employers and providers deliver home care. Its services include home health assessments for Medicare Advantage members and other government health plans. The company, which has a market value of about $4.7 billion, has been backed by multiple suitors besides Woonsocket, Rhode Island-based CVS Health, but that doesn’t mean the deal is done.
Signify may not be the only company CVS Health is looking to acquire.In its Last week’s second-quarter earnings call, Both CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch and the company’s CFO Shawn Guertin emphasized the need for deals to deliver on the strategic priorities of primary care and home health.
“As a result, we’ve been very aggressively evaluating various assets within and outside of the nursing services space,” Guertin told Wall Street analysts on a conference call, according to the transcript. “I would like to reiterate that our priority areas remain primary care provider support and family health.”
CVS Health’s forays into other areas of healthcare include health insurance with Aetna and urgent care with MinuteClinic, as well as owning CVS Caremark, a pharmacy benefits management company. But it currently does not have a doctor’s office for patients to see a doctor.The company first announced that it hopes to enter the primary care space in 2021 investor day. Expansion into home healthcare, virtual care and primary care could allow the company to become a complete end-to-end healthcare provider.
The move into primary care is both offensive and defensive for CVS Health, said Michael Greeley, co-founder and general partner at Flare Capital Partners. Given its large footprint, it makes sense for the company to become a primary care provider, and is doing so aggressively, he said.
“I think the beginning of anyone’s health care journey starts around primary care, and it’s easy to understand that it informs all the downstream, the navigation, the specialists, and how you navigate the health care system,” Greeley said. “For those entities that are in health care, you can’t ignore the primary care part of that journey.”
On the defensive side, the company owns a significant amount of real estate, some of which are located in underserved communities. Providing primary care could benefit these communities, he said.
“I think there’s a real market opportunity for them to provide these services in these communities,” Greeley said.
When it comes to potential partners in primary care, Greeley said it may look to regional partners to build a national presence. There aren’t many national primary care providers, which is what makes Amazon’s deal with One Medical so interesting, he said.
“My guess is that if you can’t buy something that scales, you end up being a regional practice, an aggregator of practices. And you’re going to stitch together a national footprint,” Greeley said. “You might be prioritizing certain markets rather than those where you’re dominant in the retail business.”
Not only has CVS Health moved to in-person primary care, but it’s also moved to virtual primary care.Boston-based telehealth company Amwell will partner with the retail giant to offer its virtual primary care services, which last week at its Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. it will act as “The consumer-focused offering is designed to bring together many elements of CVS Health’s ecosystem services into a single integrated experience with a unified digital front door,” Dr. Ido Schoenberg, Amwell’s chairman and co-CEO, said on the conference call.
company first Announce It plans to launch a virtual care platform in May, which it says will be available to eligible Aetna and CVS Caremark members. It will enable members to access primary care, on-demand care, chronic disease management and mental health services virtually.
“CVS is clearly a healthcare provider,” Greeley said. “To me, it feels like the partnership with Amwell is more focused on that now…they already have a pharmacy, so they’re providing end-to-end treatment delivery capabilities, and now they just need to pair that with a real quality primary care asset .”
Image: CVS Health
