By Nathalie Voit
CVS Health plans to enter into the primary care field with the addition of doctor offices and other primary care services, CEO Karen Lynch revealed on the company’s second-quarter earnings call.
According to a transcript of the call released on August 3, the drugstore chain has a long-term strategy to improve its health offerings in three key areas: primary care, provider enablement, and home health.
Regarding primary care, Lynch noted that CVS couldn’t compete in the primary care market without “M&A” (i.e., mergers and acquisitions).
“As you would expect, we are being very disciplined, both strategically and financially, as we pursue kind of our M&A strategy,” Lynch said in the earnings call in response to a question from Ricky Goldwasser, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.
Executive Vice President Shawn Guertin said that he expects any primary care merger or acquisition to occur by the year’s end.
“I continue to believe that we can execute on our strategic vision via M&A and begin to execute on that vision in 2022,” he added, noting that numerous acquisitions were not off the table.
“There is no one-and-done asset” here, he said.
As the nation’s foremost provider of retail health services, CVS’s foray into the primary care space does not appear all that surprising.
Other health care giants like Walgreens and Amazon have already staked out their claims in the primary care market. The latter, for instance, recently announced that it would acquire primary care provider One Medical in a $3.9 billion deal.
Besides its trademark retail drugstores, CVS offers “walk-in” retail clinic services via its subsidiary MinuteClinic.
The company also owns health insurance giant Aetna, which it acquired in 2018.
