Approximately 60% of a person’s life expectancy is influenced by their everyday activities outside of the doctor’s office including individual behaviors, as well as social and environmental factors. To address this issue and help people improve their health outside of a clinical setting, CVS Health announced the first in a series of business programs with an enhanced focus on addressing social determinants of health.
The platform also includes the investments being made at the community level as part of the recently announced Building Healthier Communities initiative, which is a $100 million commitment being funded over five years by CVS Health and the CVS Health and Aetna Foundations intended to make community health and wellness central to the company’s corporate social responsibility platform Better Health, Better Community, Better World.
As part of this effort, CVS Health will collaborate with Unite Us, the leading social care coordination platform, to help some of Aetna’s most vulnerable Medicaid and dual eligible members more easily access social services within their community. Selected Aetna members will be able to use Unite Us’ aggregated network of social care provider organizations, which they can find on their own through a proprietary technology resource developed by Unite Us. Members can also be referred by a community health provider or Aetna nurse case managers who will receive information through this platform.
CVS Health and Unite Us will make these programs and services available to Aetna Medicaid members in Louisville, Kentucky during the second half of the year. During this same time, the programs and services will also be available to Aetna’s Dual-Eligible Special Needs Plan members in Tampa, Florida and Southeastern Louisiana. With a focus on addressing housing insecurity in key markets, CVS Health is making significant investments, totaling more than $50 million by the end of this year, in affordable housing across the country to help provide support for underserved and at-risk populations.
CVS Health is the nation’s premier health innovation company helping people on their path to better health and is pioneering a bold new approach to total health by making quality care more affordable, accessible, simple, and seamless. CVS Health has more than 9,900 retail locations, approximately 1,100 walk-in medical clinics, a leading pharmacy benefits manager with approximately 94 million plan members, a dedicated senior pharmacy care business serving more than one million consumers per year and expanding specialty pharmacy services.
Unite Us is an outcome-focused technology company that builds coordinated care networks of health and human service providers. The company empowers both medical and social service providers to work together, integrating health and social care. With Unite Us, provider organizations across sectors can send and receive secure referrals, track every person’s total health journey, and report on tangible outcomes across a full range of services in a centralized, cohesive, and collaborative ecosystem.
This was reported by CVS Health on July 24, 2019.
Contact information: Ethan Slavin, Head of Media Relations, CVS Health, 1 CVS Drive, Woonsocket, Rhode Island 02895; 860-273-6095; Email: SlavinE@aetna.com; Website: http://cvshealth.com
Contact information: Unite Us, 65 North Moore Street, Floor 2, New York, New York 10013; 844-786-4838; Website: www.uniteus.com