Good morning.
“If we don’t have radical change in the health care system, we will falter and we will fail.”
Those aren’t the words of a radical activist. Instead, they were spoken by the woman who runs one of the largest players in the U.S. health care system—CVS Health. CEO Karen Lynch was the opening night speaker at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit last night, interviewed by editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. And though Lynch has reached the pinnacle of corporate power—no other woman has ever run a company as large as hers—her goal is anything but status quo. Since becoming CEO of a company that was already a mash up of drug stores and an insurance company, she has spent $8 billion to acquire home health care company Signify Health and $10.6 billion to acquire primary care provider Oak Street Health. An excerpt from her comments:
“Our vision and our strategy is really about building connections in health care. We are driving at value-based care versus volume-based care. We’re driving at consumer connections and personal engagement by using technology so that people can be connected to their health care. And we are driving at community convenience, because health care isn’t just about going to the doctor, its about being in the community and having transportation to the doctor. It's about being in the home and having access to healthy nutrition. So essentially, our strategy in a nutshell is connecting all the dots for someone on their health care journey. And so we will be in the community, we will be in the home, and we will be digitally connected.”
