The healthcare industry has lately undergone numerous seismic changes, from the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet this is an industry that still ultimately boils down to providing care for individual people—something that CVS Health president and CEO Karen S. Lynch learned early on. Her mom died by suicide when Lynch was just 12 years old, and after she and her three siblings went to live with their aunt, their new guardian was diagnosed with breast and lung cancer.
“It was a devastating time in my life,” Lynch recalls. “Watching [my mom], she didn’t know how to get the help she needed. And then I sat at a hospital bed by [my aunt’s] side, and I didn’t know what questions to ask, didn’t know what the doctors were saying. So I made it sort of a personal passion of mine to have people get better access and get better clarity on healthcare decisions.”
With that guiding principle, the Massachusetts native worked her way up as an executive at Cigna and Magellan Health Services, then took over as president and CEO of CVS Health in February 2021, just as COVID vaccines were being rolled out. In both 2021 and 2022 Fortune named her the most powerful woman in business, yet she seems less interested in talking about herself than about her company’s employees and customers. “Everybody has an experience with the healthcare system,” Lynch says, “and I am fortunate to have 300,000 people that are passionate about our purpose—about bringing our heart to every moment of someone’s health.”
On the changing health-care industry:
“I think people care more about their health than they ever have before. Consumers are demanding new ways [to access] health care. We’ve seen an advancement in technology, and people are more comfortable interacting with the system through digital connections. I’ve also seen much more receptivity toward changing your site of care, be it in the home, in a MinuteClinic like we have, or connecting through telehealth. What you’re seeing now is the intersection of technology, data, and care delivery making personal choices more simple and making access to health care easier. Health care is clearly in the middle of a significant transformation, in which we’re transitioning to a value-based care model, versus a service model. The entire ecosystem is less focused on the number of services, and more on how healthy we’re keeping our patients.”
On reaching people:
“When I took over, we were just starting the [COVID] vaccines, and we were distributing to all of our 10,000 locations across the country. Not only did we distribute them in the stores, we also had a commitment to get into underserved communities. We worked with Mass General Hospital and [brought vans] into Chelsea. They were the least-vaccinated city in Massachusetts at the time, and they became the number-one vaccinated city as a result of our partnership. We want to meet people where they are, whether it be in the community, in the home, or digitally, and I think the pandemic helped us solidify that.”
On the importance of mental health care:
“Mental health has been the collateral damage of the pandemic. The uncertainty, the social isolation has raised awareness and increased willingness to have this conversation. Your mental health and physical health are inextricably linked. I think business leaders today are very focused on it and have a tremendous role that they can play—there’s an opportunity to have this serve as a catalyst of change. We have to increase access to mental health care. Before the pandemic, we had about 20,000 mental-health-care televisits, and now we have over 20 million. So there’s a huge demand, and we’ve made it easier to access through virtual capabilities. We also added social workers to our MinuteClinics, if people want to have a face-to-face. A lot of the problem with mental health is that there’s been a stigma; it’s shameful. I didn’t talk about why my mother died for many, many years. I was embarrassed, and people shouldn’t feel that way. It’s part of your health.”
On authentic leadership:
“During the pandemic, I would share stories about my everyday life—because we were all at home, and everyone was struggling—and I talked about learning how to cook. One day, I asked my husband, ‘How does it taste?’ And he said, ‘Karen, it’s OK, but there’s just one thing missing: flavor.’ I shared that story with all of our colleagues, and I got recipes, I got ideas for spices. When you’re a leader, it’s important to be real, because people want to know that you’re a real person.”
