CVS introduces agentic AI platform, new health tech subsidiary

CVS Health is throwing its hat into the agentic AI ring.

The retail pharmacy giant announced a partnership with Google Cloud on March 5 to create an agentic AI platform meant to boost consumer engagement in healthcare. The platform will fall under a new health tech services subsidiary called Health100.

“Consumer engagement in their own health and care is the holy grail that will drive trust and much better health outcomes,” Tilak Mandadi, EVP of ventures and chief experience and technology officer at CVS Health, said in a press release.

The platform will pull patient data from pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacies, providers, and digital health systems into one place, Tony Ambrozie, SVP and chief digital, technology and information officer at CVS Health Pharmacy and Consumer Wellness, told Reuters.

Analysts weigh in. Michael Cherny, a senior research analyst at healthcare investment bank Leerink Partners, told Healthcare Brew he views the agentic AI platform as “the most unifying effort” CVS has attempted, as it leverages the “functionality of all three of its major businesses since the Aetna acquisition first happened.”

Having one place to store patient health data will help CVS “manage the medical and pharmacy side of any member’s condition” as well as give the company an opportunity to direct consumers to its physical locations, Cherny said.

Cherny recalled a demonstration given last year of how the agentic AI platform will work using the example of a patient going through knee surgery. The platform would prescribe some presurgery medications dispensed through a CVS pharmacy and later check in with the patient postsurgery. It would then curate a list of medications and supplies the patient might need for recovery, which they could pick up from a CVS location.

“It was a really nice anecdotal view of how using the power of the app [and] leveraging additional service capabilities above and beyond it…could allow for CVS to have a frequent amount of touch points for an individual’s health journey, which also all come with revenue streams for CVS because of the totality of assets they own,” Cherny said.

Michael Abrams, a managing partner at healthcare consulting firm Numerof and Associates, looked at the agentic AI news with a slightly more skeptical eye.

“The press release was pretty vague. There was hardly anything there that you could assign an operational meaning to,” Abrams said. “I don’t think they either know or aren’t ready to disclose exactly what this platform is going to do and where the value is going to come from.”

Zooming out. CVS is also experimenting with agentic digital twins to help the company conduct research on its products and services instead of gathering people for research studies, IT Brew reported. The company uses more than 100,000 digital twins, which it says allows it to be proactive instead of reactive in terms of how it offers services, Sri Narasimhan, VP of enterprise customer experience and insights at CVS Health, told IT Brew.

Amazon has also embraced agentic AI in its healthcare business, launching Amazon One Medical’s Health AI in January. The agentic AI assistant was designed to give “24/7 personalized health guidance grounded in each patient’s unique medical history,” Healthcare Brew previously reported.

Amazon Web Services also launched an agentic AI platform in March geared toward helping healthcare workers save time on administrative tasks, Fierce Healthcare reported.