CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) has tapped telehealth company Amwell to provide its new virtual primary care offering, which includes on-demand behavioral health services.
In May, the retail giant announced its plan to launch CVS Health Virtual Primary Care. It will begin rolling out the service to Aetna fully insured, self-insured plan sponsors and CVS Caremark clients in January 2023.
“This is a new consumer-centric offering designed to bring together the many elements of CVS Health ecosystem services into a single integrated experience with a unified digital front door,” Amwell CEO Ido Schoenberg said on the company’s Q2 earnings call Friday. “The CVS Virtual Care digital front door is an exciting new initiative, and we are honored to be selected as the backdrop for this vision.”
The service will offer access to primary care, mental health, chronic pain management and the option of in-person care.
This isn’t the first time Amwell and CVS have teamed up. In 2016, the pair came together with Cleveland Clinic on a deal to connect CVS MinuteClinic patients virtually to Cleveland Clinic providers.
Amwell’s top competitor, Teladoc, also has deals with CVS. In 2021, Teladoc and CVS subsidiary Aetna inked a deal to form the Aetna Virtual Primary Care services.
Looking to keep pace with competitors of its own, such as Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA), CVS Health has actively been seeking to build, buy or partner with a variety of new care capabilities. On Sunday, in fact, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company planned to bid on Signify Health (NYSE: SGFY), which is rumored to be up for sale.
“We are expecting to enhance our health services in three categories: primary care, provider enablement and home health,” CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch said during a Q2 earnings call. “There are multiple pathways for us to make a mark on community health care and our ability to achieve our strategic goals. We have very specific criteria that we look at as we’re evaluating our many options. We look to see if there’s a strong management team, a very strong tech stack, the ability to scale and a pathway to profitability.”
In addition to the CVS deal, Amwell continues to prioritize behavioral health services at large. It plans to fully integrate its direct-to-consumer behavioral health subsidiary, Silvercloud, into its overall behavioral health solution.
“This positions us to deliver this compelling solution to the market more quickly, enabling our payer and provider customers to reach more members than patients with best-in-class care, driving substantial cost savings and patient benefits during this time of great need,” Schoenberg said.
Overall this quarter, Amwell missed its earnings per share by $0.02, but beat its revenue expectations by roughly $390,000. It reported a Q2 2022 revenue of $64.5 million.
Schoenberg stressed that behavioral health was a key part of its partnership strategy for the future and highlighted insights from its deal with Dignity Health.
“The Dignity Health digital behavioral health team told us they aim to make virtual care indistinguishable from in-person care, thanks to insight from the data they are using to demonstrate quality outcomes,” Schoenberg said. “With our programs, they were able to drive behavioral health visits up from 300 per month to well over 1,000 per month, allowing Dignity Health to dramatically leverage their providers and extend the benefit of digital care in the bear health ramp.”
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