Good morning.
Yesterday was International Women’s Day, and I got to spend it with a woman who has climbed farther up the corporate ladder than any in history—Karen Lynch, CEO of CVS Health, now No. 4 on the Fortune 500 list. I interviewed Lynch at the Lake Nona Impact Forum, where she laid out her vision of how her company is going to transform health care.
She’s certainly assembled the resources to do it. CVS Health includes the eponymous stores, which can be found within five miles of 85% of Americans; the health insurance giant Aetna; the pharmacy benefit manager Caremark; and if all goes well, two new businesses that Lynch has agreed to acquire for a combined $18 billion—Signify, which provides at-home health evaluation and care to millions of people each year, and Oak Street Health, which operates 169 clinics in 21 states providing health and wellness care to seniors. The goal of it all, Lynch told the Lake Nona crowd, is to make care more accessible and affordable, make it simpler, and engage people more fully in the health care system.
Ellen McGirt and I also interviewed Lynch this week for our Leadership Next podcast, and you can hear her describe her vision by downloading from Apple or Spotify. A few excerpts:
“One of the things that I've learned over the course of the last couple of years is that people are more focused on their health than they ever have been. People want to be connected to their health. They want to live longer lives. And the way that you do that is through engagement.”
“What I want to do as a company is have you think about CVS Health as your kind of place to go. I want to make it easy, and I want to make it simple, and I want to make it affordable.”
By the way, CVS Health is the presenting partner of Fortune Well, which you can read here. More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
