CVS Health’s new digital innovation lab focuses on customer experience

BOSTON — Imagine a world where access to any health information or services you needed was available at any time through your digital device. We are not there yet, but CVS Health is doing its best to create that world with its new Digital Innovation Lab located in Boston.

“We are a pharmacy innovation company at the forefront of changing healthcare for the better across the country,” declared Brian Tilzer, chief digital officer of CVS Health, during the official launch ceremony of the lab on June 18. “We want to change how healthcare is delivered in this country, and digital is at the heart of the transformation.”

Tilzer explained that consumers are now always connected with digital devices they carry with them all the time. This allows CVS to engage them as never before, anywhere and anytime.

“We were bold when we got cigarettes out of our stores, which was a $2 billion business for us,” said Tilzer. “We are being equally bold with digital.”

One major healthcare problem CVS is tacking with digital technology is what Tilzer called an “epidemic” of people across the country not staying on their medication schedules. CVS now sends text reminders to 20 million customers to take their prescription medications. The lab will work to enhance this program by putting prescription reminder capability into the CVS mobile app, as well as by allowing customers to assign a relative or friend to receive digital alerts if they fail to take their medication.

CVS has tripled its investment in digital technology since Tilzer joined CVS in 2013, and he said the company will double that amount moving forward. Using the largest retail deployment to date of beacon technology, CVS delivers personalized alerts for prescriptions, as well as personalized discounts on other items, to members of its ExtraCare loyalty program when they enter the store. The ExtraCare loyalty card can now be embedded in the mobile CVS app, enhancing convenience.

However, CVS is not standing pat with this functionality. During a brief tour of a couple of demo stations, attendees got a glimpse of how CVS develops new solutions, as well as a few solutions that will likely hit the market in the not-too-distant future.

“We run the team like a start-up,” said Tilzer. “We combine Fortune 10 resources with rapid experimentation, using the strategy of test, learn, iterate.”

Employees at the lab, as well as remote employees connecting through telepresence technology from locations in Rhode Island, Illinois and New Jersey, work to better serve the needs of the customer. Products can be developed from the idea stage to chainwide rollout in less than a year, with pilots at select stores before national implementation.

One solution currently in development is providing customers the ability to scan their insurance card with their smartphone and send the photo to their local CVS store for card updates. This saves time and enhances accuracy by securely sending the data straight to CVS pharmacy systems. CVS also intends to eventually expand functionality to also send card data directly to its own pharmacy benefit management system, as well as the systems of third-party insurance providers.

CVS is also working on allowing customers to scan their drivers license barcode when registering for the CVS application for automatic population of personal information fields, as well as extending reminders to take and refill prescriptions to its Apple Watch app. The reminder would appear on the user’s Apple Watch screen without having to open the app, and they would be able to refill all prescriptions with one tap, especially valuable for chronic patients who must take multiple medications.

In the production lab, attendees saw how CVS is working to improve the connected capabilities of third-party medical devices. For example, CVS is currently helping produce a device that would connect to a smartphone to take a video of a patient’s inner ear and then send it to Minute Clinic pharmacists for instant diagnosis and prescription for ear infections.

“We have an enormous ability to make a difference in healthcare in this country,” Tilzer said.