CVS Health CEO: ‘We Supported 10M Virtual Visits Just for Mental Health’

CVS Health Corp. (NYSE: CVS) saw the number of mental health visits it provided via telehealth in 2021 increase 1,000x compared to pre-pandemic levels.

On Wednesday, CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch said this explosion in digital mental health visits is more widely indicative of the Woonsocket, Rhode Island-based retail health care and health benefits company’s primary care and digital strategies.

“Pre-pandemic, back in 2019, we supported 10,000 virtual mental health visits,” Lynch said Wednesday during the company’s first-quarter earnings conference call. “Last year, we supported 10 million virtual visits just for mental health. This dramatic increase demonstrates the power of our ability to drive innovation at scale.”

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Across all settings, telehealth utilization accelerated at breakneck speed because of the pandemic and responses to it. Mental health, developmental disorders and substance use disorders collectively accounted for 48% of all telehealth claims in 2020, according to a study by Fair Health. The same study found that telehealth utilization in 2020 increased 7,060% across all specialties compared to 2019.

An estimate from the federal government shows that Medicare telehealth visits for behavioral health in 2020 increased by more than 3,000%.

CVS Health beat revenue and earnings expectations, generating $76.83 billion in revenue and $2.22 in earnings per share in the first quarter.

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Mental health is a key point of CVS Health’s primary care strategy, Dan Finke, executive vice president and president of health care benefits, said during the company’s investor day in December.

“And as we focus on the health of the whole person, we’ll embed mental health services into our primary care offering,” Finke said. “We’ll build on the mental health services that we have today in our HealthHUBs (one of CVS’ store types) and our behavioral health company.

“Mental health is an unmet need and it is clearly one of the biggest collateral damages of the pandemic.”

In his presentation, Finke said that integrating mental health required destigmatizing mental health issues. CVS Health’s approach to talking about mental health will be to wrap it in other aspects of health such as sleep issues.

He also said that CVS Health expected to provide 8 million virtual behavioral health visits to health plan members of Aetna, the national health plan that it acquired in November 2018 for $69 billion.

Across all services, CVS Health served nearly 44 million unique digital customers at the end of the first quarter, Lynch said.

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