Microsoft is helping Rhode Island-based CVS Health reimagine personalised care and accelerate its digital transformation.

CVS Health is an American healthcare company that owns retail pharmacy chain CVS Pharmacy, the CVS Caremark pharmacy benefits manager, and Aetna, a health insurance provider.

CVS Health and Microsoft have formed an alliance to help consumers improve their health, while empowering over 300,000 CVS Health employees – including frontline workers – with tools to serve more than 100 million people.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, organisations in every industry – health care in particular – have grappled with the need to adapt quickly. According to an Economist Intelligence Unit study commissioned by Microsoft, organisations have accelerated transformation initiatives and have begun to rely more heavily on digital tools. From creating hybrid environments to help employees work from home virtually, to deploying new applications to support frontline workers, digital transformation has become a necessity for business resilience, accelerating growth and driving efficiencies.

“We are rapidly transforming into a consumer-centric, integrated health company, taking a digital-first, technology forward approach to all that we do,” said Roshan Navagamuwa, chief information officer at CVS Health. “Business services at this scale requires a new level of partnership. Our collaboration with Microsoft will accelerate this work and empower our employees to provide quality care that is more personal and affordable.”

The collaboration should help CVS accelerate a data-driven, personalised customer experience, while complying with the company’s patient privacy and confidentiality policies. By combining information from different areas across the company with agility, CVS hopes to enhance its omnichannel pharmacy capabilities and deliver customised health recommendations when and where consumers need them. It will also scale up retail loyalty and personalisation programmes that use machine-learning models running on the Azure cloud computing service.

In addition to creating a more personalised and seamless experience for consumers, data science will also be used to improve access to care and health outcomes. The ability to create a simple, easy-to-use patient experience has been critical to CVS’s role in the Covid-19 vaccination effort, delivering insights and recommendations to ensure equitable and efficient administration of approximately 43 million vaccines.

Throughout the pandemic, CVS retail employees have continued to support their communities by staying focused on their day-to-day responsibilities. Through the use of Microsoft Teams and Office products, CVS hopes to be more agile, helping retail employees consume key information to answer common questions and solve customer problems faster.

CVS currently leverages Azure cognitive services such as computer vision and text analytics for health that automate tasks. In specialty pharmacy, for example, CVS has digitised intake using these services, including the 40 per cent of prescriptions that arrive as paper or fax, helping technicians fill prescriptions faster and easier than previous methods.

CVS selected Microsoft as a preferred cloud provider for applications based on a history of engineering and co-innovation. Azure will play a key role in CVS’s acceleration of its digital transformation by expanding the company’s multi-cloud presence to more than 1500 new and existing business applications in Azure cloud.

Microsoft and CVS will also explore technology to support consumers, employees and ecosystem partners. Microsoft HoloLens, Dynamics 365 Guides and Remote Assist can simplify complex procedures with intuitive tools to help support employees. Microsoft Azure AI and cognitive capabilities can also extend to automate administrative and predictive processes and reduce waste through co-innovation with CVS’s community presence and health-care expertise.

“We are excited to partner with CVS Health on its digital transformation journey, collaborating together on how the company manages health data at scale, improves the customer experience and drives operational efficiency,” said Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s chief commercial officer. “With the Azure platform and its AI capabilities, we will combine the power of data, the expansive reach of CVS Health’s world-class solutions, and Microsoft Teams to connect health care experts and create customised care and services that enable people to live healthier lives.”

CVS Health has 300,000 employees, including more than 40,000 physicians, pharmacists, nurses and nurse practitioners.