Day in the life of Amy Compton-Phillips, chief medical officer at CVS Health

In an industry meant to shape people’s lives for the better, some people go to a hospital room and others go to an office. Amy Compton-Phillips has done both.

The now chief medical officer at CVS Health started her career as an internist at Oakland, California-based health system Kaiser Permanente.

“I always wanted to be a doctor,” she told Healthcare Brew. “It was my calling.”

Compton-Phillips worked at Kaiser for 22 years, moving her way up to service chief for the department of internal medicine and running a medical office. Eventually, she ended her time there as chief quality officer at leadership and consulting organization the Permanente Federation and physician director of population care, which works to improve care quality.

“As a primary care doctor, I could take care of a person sitting directly in front of me,” she said. But by going on the leadership track, she felt like she could “make little changes that could make lives better” for thousands of patients.

As of April 2025, she’s been with CVS Health, where she took her expertise gained from clinical practice and brought it to administrative work in an effort to enact more change.

Compton-Phillips took Healthcare Brew through a day in her life at work.

Personal mission

Before CVS, Compton-Phillips was offered a “big job” at Kaiser Permanente’s national office, and for the first time in her career, she said no. Compton-Phillips had two young children at the time and didn’t want to move across the country, so she went to work part time for a bit to manage things at home.

“I was able to take a couple of years to do what I needed to for my kids, and they did come back and I ended up taking the national job at Kaiser as the chief quality officer,” she said.

After Kaiser, but before joining CVS, Compton-Phillips worked for Providence St. Joseph Health in Seattle, Washington, as president of clinical operations and then healthcare analytics company Press Ganey as president and chief physician executive. She ended up at CVS because she felt like she could better fulfill her personal mission “to make great health and compassionate care available for all.”

So she joined a company that had 9,000 retail pharmacies, health insurer Aetna, and pharmacy benefit manager Caremark—all of which factor into her role—as well as 300,000+ employees. In her role, she oversees the chief medical officers of Aetna, Caremark, CVS’s urgent care Minute Clinic, and of healthcare delivery, as well as the chief quality officer, head of women’s health and genomics, and the chief psychiatric officer.

“People won’t trust us if we’re giving bad advice, if we’re providing the wrong care, if we’re inadvertently denying things that should be approved,” she added. So her job, she said, is making sure her staff has the systems in place to provide the best care.

Day-to-day goals

At Aetna, for example, she’s looking at how to simplify prior authorization to ensure people have access to the right care—a process that can sometimes slow down health coverage. For Caremark, she’s looking at how to get patients medication at the right time for an affordable price, as high drug costs can limit access. On the retail side, she’s focused on safe, effective medication delivery and healthy shelves.

With new technology on the market today like AI scribes, Compton-Phillips said she’s also hopeful about giving more face time back to providers.

CVS is also looking to implement AI that can make sure the right pills are put in the right bottles, she said, and that can review care history to determine medical necessity to speed up approvals on the health insurance side of the company.

“It’s not AI making decisions but AI helping streamline and simplify the information that allows us to get things done,” she said.

As Compton-Phillips comes up on her first year with CVS, she said she was challenged by “coming in as a newbie” into an impactful role. She had to learn a lot of different areas of healthcare, adding, “the way I dealt with it was to beg forgiveness and learn from the people who do the work day to day here.”

“People just want to be able to get help and advice and care and coaching, when and how they need it, as close to home as possible, and what I love about my job here at CVS is we get to think about that entire spectrum of care,” she said.