Delivering More Connected Care Through AI: CVS Health's Josh Weiner

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Organizations can use AI to improve healthcare by making it more personalized, connected, preventative, and accessible. Find out how one leader thinks about these four dimensions on today's episode.

**Josh Weiner** (0:15)
I'm Josh Weiner from CVS Health, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:20)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy Guest Editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:39)
I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, Senior Partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate. Hi, everyone. Today, Sam and I are speaking with Josh Weiner, Senior Vice President of Consumer Engagement and Analytics at CVS Health. Hi, Josh. Welcome to the program.

**Josh Weiner** (1:18)
Thanks, Shervin. Pleasure to be here.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:20)
I'm sure most of our listeners know what CVS is, but maybe you could give us an overview of the company and your role there.

**Josh Weiner** (1:29)
Happy to do so. Let me actually start with health care. Health care is deeply personal to me. I was born with a rare genetic condition, and from an early age up until now, I've dealt firsthand with challenges, whether it's cost or authorizations or this premise of navigation and figuring out what's covered and trying to repeat 35 years of medical history to every new clinician I see, and wishing there was just a summary of that or a way to share that. For those reasons, I've decided to dedicate my career to improving health care, and my personal passion is affordability of health care. CVS is one of the largest integrated health care companies in the US with subsidiaries that include Aetna, a health insurer, Caremark, pharmacy benefits manager, the largest retail pharmacy, our core CVS pharmacy, as well as increasingly some care delivery businesses you may have seen in the news, Oak Street Health, Signify. And with respect to my role, as you said, I'm the Senior Vice President of Consumer Engagement and Analytics. My priority is developing experiences for our consumers to help them improve their health. And increasingly, we're using AI to revolutionize those experiences. And I believe that's a focus for today's discussion.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:00)
Wonderful. So maybe let's just dive right in. What are some examples of the kind of experiences that you're trying to create? And what does AI's role there?

**Josh Weiner** (3:10)
Great question. As a structure, I'm optimistic about AI's opportunity to revolutionize consumer health care experiences. And there are four areas I'm focused on. More personalized care, more connected care, more preventative care, and more accessible care. And within each of those, we have priorities that we're confident will make a big difference for you and I and our consumers. When I think about some of the most exciting examples, several come to mind. But I'll start with our development of personal health agents. Historically, the opportunity to truly develop personalized care plans for consumers has been impossible. I mean, the unfortunate reality is for a given person based on a condition, and if you're lucky, your gender, your age, and some understanding of behavioral preferences, you're assigned a care plan. And that care plan doesn't really update depending on how well you're progressing. And when you get another checkup in a year or so, maybe review it and maybe at that point, you'll make some changes. And that's about the best we could do before AI. The reality is there's just too many people that we need to create some clusters, we need to go ahead and use humans to develop care plans and move forward.
AI has changed this. With AI, we can now make the most of our launch to a new set of unstructured health data, medical claims, electronic medical records, labs, as well as wearable data, and use agents to say, here's what a personalized goal might look like, based on how you're actually progressing on a day-to-day basis, here's an updated goal, and from streaming those health data sets, identify emerging gaps in care or opportunities to help achieve your health goals, and hopefully more likely gets where you want to go from a healthcare perspective. The role of CVS is that of what is typically characterized as care management or clinical support programs, and it's something that either a pharmacist from the pharmacy business or a nurse from one of the health plans typically provides. And they are not prescribing medication or performing surgeries. Their role is to help you close gaps in care, understand and interpret clinician care plans and help you achieve your goals. Often with telephonic outreach on an ongoing basis to check in on how things are going. Areas like managing side effects, adhering to your medication, or understanding and scheduling the importance of preventative care visits, whether it's diagnostics or screenings, fall within the scope of the clinical teams in CVS Health's umbrella. Now historically, it has been difficult to share those experiences and insights with provider groups. The largest systems, we have integrations with their EMRs and there is interoperability and it's seamless and they know about your interactions with the care management team and we know about your interactions with clinicians. But as you well know, we aren't where we hoped we would be from an interoperability perspective. This is actually another area that AI is transforming because we can work around different systems and different data models and have agents talk to each other to facilitate data sharing without spending three years and a lot of money trying to integrate legacy systems.