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Healthcare Brew

Covid-19

Maia Anderson

Healthcare Brew delivers the latest news and trends in healthcare.

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While all of healthcare suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic, nursing homes were hit particularly hard.

At the start of the pandemic, nearly half of all Covid deaths were people living or working in long-term care facilities, according to data from KFF. By early 2022, more than 200,000 people had died from the virus, making up roughly 23% of all Covid-related deaths in the US, KFF found.

Part of this can be attributed to the fact that nursing home residents tend to be at higher risk for contracting viruses due to their age, and living close together means it’s easier for illness to spread.

 may lie in the fact that nursing homes are 

 and run on extremely thin margins—often 3% or less in 2020, according to a survey from the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL), a trade group that represents long-term care facilities.

And the fact that private equity (PE) firms are increasingly buying up nursing homes is 

 those troubles worse, some experts argue.

PE firms own somewhere between 5% to 13% of nursing homes in the US as of 2025, though a lack of transparency into ownership structures makes it virtually impossible to know the exact number, according to an April 2025 report from the nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP).

An October 2020 study from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York estimated that about 4.7% of nursing homes—or 543 of 11,470 in the study—were PE-owned during part of that year.

“Private equity firms are able to engineer financial returns for themselves from the nursing homes that they own by using a playbook of legal but dubious tactics that can include high debt levels, the sale of real estate assets, and cost-cutting measures that can put workers and residents at risk,” Michael Fenne, a senior research and campaign coordinator at PESP who coauthored the firm’s report, told Healthcare Brew.

PE ownership can lead to worse care quality at nursing homes as well as other types of healthcare facilities like 

 distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research states that after a PE firm buys a nursing home, the facility sees an average 1.4% reduction in staffing and 3% decrease in paid hours. Mortality rates also increase by 11%, the researchers said in the paper.

And a 2021 study from Weill Cornell found people living in a PE-owned nursing home were 11.1% more likely to have an emergency room trip and 8.7% more likely to be hospitalized for a “largely” preventable cause.

“Private equity ownership can leave nursing homes with less financial flexibility to respond to emerging care needs or changing conditions on the ground,” Fenne said. “It can also leave nursing homes with fewer resources to pay wages, acquire protective equipment, or spend on other supplies and resources.”

But PE ownership may also have some upsides, such as “operational improvements and capital infusion,” researchers wrote in a July 2025 

With such stark concerns over the quality of care received at PE-owned nursing homes, the connection between the numerous Covid deaths that occurred in these facilities and their ownership structure may seem obvious.

For example, at the height of the pandemic, a PE firm called the Portopiccolo Group came under 

 for buying more than 20 nursing homes, which employees said worsened patient care.

However, the available data on whether PE ownership directly worsened outcomes during the pandemic shows no direct correlation.

An October 2020 study from Weill Cornell that looked at nursing homes on a national scale found PE ownership had “no statistically significant” impact on staffing levels, number of Covid cases, or deaths.

The study, however, did find that PE-owned nursing homes tended to have less personal protective equipment (PPE) on hand than other facilities. Widespread PPE shortages 

 many medical facilities during the early days of the pandemic.

John Collins, a spokesperson for Portopiccolo, told the Washington Post in 2020 that the quality of care residents received at the firm’s nursing homes did not decline during the pandemic.

“Our company was founded by people who share a passion for caring for the sick, elderly, and forgotten. Any attempts to characterize our work or the work of our teams differently is flat out wrong,” he said.

Rachel Reeves, a spokesperson for AHCA/NCAL, told Healthcare Brew that “focusing on private equity in long-term care has become a distraction from the real issues that impact the majority of providers, like 

“The reality is that owners of long-term care facilities are extremely diverse and are often run by small, independent operators,” Reeves said.

Given the potential risk posed by PE ownership, Mark Unruh, associate professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell who coauthored the university’s 2020 and 2021 studies, told Healthcare Brew there “absolutely” should be more oversight and regulation of nursing home deals.

Two prominent PE-owned nursing home companies in PESP’s report (LaVie Care Centers, which operated under names including Consulate Health Care, and Gulf Coast Health Care) as well as a PE firm that specialized in long-term care centers (Goldner Capital Management) have all filed for bankruptcy in recent years.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a 

 in 2023, Unruh noted, that would require more transparency in reporting the ownership structure for nursing homes.

“It’s a wonderful first step, but the problem with that rule is there’s no teeth to it,” Unruh said. “There’s no enforcement mechanism to ensure that the owners were actually reporting the information as they should.”

So, the logical next step would be for CMS to add an auditing process and implement consequences if nursing homes don’t report the required information, according to Unruh.

“I think that private equity has an incentive to keep acquiring nursing homes and keep making financial returns for themselves using the same set of tactics until something is changed in the policy landscape,” Fenne said.

Rear view of female caregiver assisting senior woman walking with mobility walker in corridor

As private equity firms buy up nursing homes, some studies suggest the ownership model worsens care quality 

Nursing homes were hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, and some data suggests private equity ownership made care quality worse. 

Cassie McGrath

It’s been more than five years since the arrival of Covid-19, which has led to the deaths of 1.2 million in the US and 7+ million around the world, according to the 

Readers may also remember another crisis that emerged alongside the pandemic: pediatric mental health.

From March to October 2020, emergency department mental health visits rose about 24% among children ages 5–11 and around 31% among ages 12–17 from the year prior, 

. Suicide attempts also rose nearly 51% among teenage girls in 2021 compared to 2019, the 

At that time, there weren’t enough providers to meet the increased need, an issue the industry has reckoned with 

 leading up to the pandemic. As a result, many young patients ended up 

 in the ER to be admitted to inpatient care.

To help address this need for care, several new behavioral health startups popped up during the pandemic. While not all of them made it—like 

—others, like InStride Health and Brightline, are still going strong.

“It was very clear that what was in existence at the time was not sufficient to meet the needs of kids and families,” InStride Health co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Mona Potter told Healthcare Brew.

Christine Crawford, associate medical director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told us there was a youth mental health crisis before 2020, but the pandemic made it worse.

“The system was already quite fragile—and fragmented—prior to the pandemic,” she said. But due to social distancing practices and a loss of social activities, there was a “worsening of mental health symptoms.”

Naomi Allen co-founded California-based Brightline, which provides in-person and online appointments, in 2019. She already had 10 years of experience in executive leadership for new digital health companies, including Castlight Health and Livongo, helping adults with care navigation and chronic disease management.

But Allen pivoted to pediatric mental health when one of her children was in need.

“We just really struggled as a family to navigate the healthcare system,” she said. “We paid cash for everything. Most of our clinicians were out of network…and we sat on a waitlist for nine months.”

The idea was to establish physical clinics for in-person appointments with therapists and psychiatrists, supplemented with a digital platform for caregivers to help them do everything from scheduling appointments to following along to see how the child was progressing.

Brightline was getting ready to open its first clinic in Q1 2020 when the pandemic hit, so it shifted to online only. 

Across the country, another startup—InStride Health—emerged in 2021 for similar reasons. It was built out of McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Massachusetts associated with Mass General Brigham.

Potter originally thought she would only work in academic medicine for her whole career, where she was developing “cutting-edge” treatments, like the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program (MAMP). This specialized treatment program launched in 2014 to treat kids with severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder using cognitive behavior therapy and group meetings.

Yet lingering were inquiries from families who needed help for their children but faced a four- to six-month wait list “at all times” due to limited participant capacities in academic medicine.

So Potter took MAMP out of academia and built the fully virtual InStride Health, which allowed her team to negotiate directly with insurance companies and design a technology platform.

That shift to telehealth was one of the pandemic’s long-standing impacts on healthcare. It forced providers to move from in-person to virtual care “in one day,” Potter said, creating a “natural experiment” for her team to collect data and evaluate its effectiveness.

From March to June 2019, only 0.3% of all medical treatments for working-age individuals were conducted via telehealth, but in the first three months of the pandemic in 2020, that portion shot up to 23.6%—a 766% increase, according to a 

In October 2020, Brightline also launched a Covid-19 behavioral health indicator, a 30-question survey, to help parents understand the impact of the pandemic on their child’s mental health, Allen said.

“We felt this immense need for moving with speed because we knew we were out in front and that families had a tremendous amount of need,” she said.

Brightline now has 550 employer customers across six states. It also launched in-person care, with one clinic in Brooklyn and two more under development in Manhattan and Long Island. By next year, Allen said she expects to have eight to 10 additional sites, but did not specify where.

InStride is fully active in 10 states, and Potter said the goal is to expand it to all 50. In 2025, the company enrolled 2,500 new patients.

Both companies also addressed out-of-pocket payment challenges patients previously faced, making sure their services are covered under some commercial plans.

Speaking of challenges, upcoming Trump administration 

 for LGBTQ+ youth are presenting additional hurdles to care, Allen said, as the 

Still, Allen said greater awareness in schools and among the public has made a difference. In 2022, KFF 

 of US residents think there is a mental health crisis in the country.

“If there is any silver lining coming out of Covid, it’s that the child and youth mental health crisis that existed already is certainly much more the national dialogue,” she said.

Close up of African-American psychologist taking notes on clipboard in therapy session for children

Pediatric mental health startups launched during Covid. Here’s where they stand now 

Brightline and InStride offered a new kind of care for kids. 

illustrated headshot of caroline catherman, healthcare brew reporter

Caroline Catherman

, medical supply shortages got so severe that nurses fashioned masks and gowns out of pool noodles and 

Many factors have been blamed: inadequate stockpiles, slow government action, equipment hoarding. But one that has been especially relevant—and is relevant again today as 

 tensions heat up—is US reliance on foreign personal protective equipment (PPE), supply chain experts told us.

The government invested more than $1 billion to bulk up domestic PPE manufacturing during that first pandemic year, but five years later, the companies that emerged from those efforts have mostly 

 on foreign manufacturers for PPE and other medical necessities. The American Hospital Association calculated in April the US imported over $75 billion in medical devices and supplies in 2024 alone.

 could send the country right back to March 2020.

“If we don’t change the trajectory we are in right now, we’re guaranteed to repeat the same thing,” Tinglong Dai, Bernard T. Ferrari professor of business at Johns Hopkins University, told Healthcare Brew.

Prior to Covid, PPE wasn’t a concern for Premier, a large healthcare group purchasing organization (GPO) that works with more than 4,350 hospitals and health systems. But hospitals needed 17x their usual supply of N-95 masks after they began admitting Covid patients, according to Premier’s April 2020 survey of nearly 1,600 hospitals.

“PPE was always a low variability, very transactional category for our hospital supply chain until Covid hit,” Kyle MacKinnon, senior director of operational excellence at Premier’s supply chain strategic operations, told Healthcare Brew.

 and price gouged PPE early in the pandemic. Supply and demand surged unpredictably and quickly as pockets of the world were exposed to the virus, MacKinnon said.

Another issue is GPOs like Premier didn’t—and still don’t—have data down to the stock-keeping unit on which locations and manufacturing plants products come from, Mark Hendrickson, Premier’s director of supply chain policy, told us.

He said Premier now asks suppliers for “very specific, very detailed data” on their product volume, reliability, and manufacturing locations. The company is lobbying for the US government to track this data better as well.

“We need more transparency on where products are coming from. We need more reporting from manufacturers to the FDA so they can understand where they can pull levers in an emergency,” he said.

Amid 2020’s uncertainty, the federal government invested more than $1 billion in subsidies to increase domestic PPE production. As a result, dozens of domestic startups emerged to manufacture masks, medical gowns, and gloves.

GPOs and hospitals relied on those startups amid increased demand, MacKinnon said. But today, he said, they have largely returned to pre-pandemic purchasing patterns.

“As an industry, we shifted back from that ‘just-in-case’ scenario planning and supply planning to ‘just-in-time’ where now you have to be cost-conscious and get back to a leaner, more profitable organization,” MacKinnon said.

 of US import data by the American Medical Manufacturers Association (AMMA)—a trade association that lobbies against US reliance on Chinese-made PPE—estimates the US uses about 110 billion to 120 billion nitrile gloves each year.

The fact is, China can offer cheaper PPE and a larger portfolio of product models compared to those US pandemic-era startups, Dai said. The US startups couldn’t compete.

“A lot of the companies that were standing up during Covid, as you go back to the beginning, disappeared because they were just undercut overnight,” AMMA Executive Director Eric Axel told us.

MacKinnon said Premier learned from the pandemic and is set up to be “more resilient” during the next one. The industry now has a “thorough playbook” with better data and technology to 

But this return to foreign reliance, Dai warned, may weaken the supply chain when the next emergency comes, whatever it is.

“We have basically moved back to the same—if not worse—dependence on foreign manufacturers for most of the PPE needs here in the US,” Dai said.

US manufacturers could lower costs and compete more effectively with foreign PPE manufacturers if they invested in newer, large-scale production technologies, according to Dai.

The problem? They need large orders with up-front payments to afford those upgrades.

Dai thinks the government could help here by filling its national PPE stockpile with 100% Made in USA PPE to bring “stable demand” to domestic manufacturing, along with other steps, like tax incentives. AMMA has lobbied for those changes, too.

Increasing any manufacturing—not just PPE manufacturing—would be helpful, Dai added, because other manufacturing operations can be converted into PPE assembly lines in emergencies.

July’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes provisions that help domestic medical manufacturers, like bringing back R&D tax credits, Axel said.

He added tariffs are another tool to “even the playing field” for domestic manufacturers.

Companies like Abbott Laboratories, Merck, and Roche 

 since early this year to invest more in US manufacturing, though they did not directly attribute their decisions to tariffs. On the flip side, some experts 

 Healthcare Brew tariffs could strain the supply chain.

But Axel argues the medical supply chain is already strained because it relies on foreign manufacturers, some of which have been flagged for creating allegedly unsafe supplies. (The 

 has identified safety issues in several brands of syringes from China, for instance.)

Axel also believes the US has seen—and will see again far before a global pandemic occurs—repercussions from its lack of diverse domestic manufacturers. He pointed to disruptions from 

“Covid is already a lesson from a different era,” he said.

A worker oversees the production of KN95 masks in Handan, North China's Hebei Province in 2022.

Despite Covid-19 pandemic efforts, the US still mostly imports PPE

While we love a throwback, the Covid-19 pandemic’s first year isn’t something we want to revisit.

Despite pandemic efforts, the US still mostly imports PPE

If you can believe it, it’s already been half a decade since the WHO 

Since then, more than 1.2 million people in the US and 7 million people globally have died from the virus, according to CDC and WHO estimates. And while the Department of Health and Human Services 

 the public health emergency over on May 11, 2023, hundreds of people in the US still die from the virus each week, the CDC’s 

For the five-year anniversary of the pandemic’s beginning, executives from across healthcare shared with Healthcare Brew how the public health crisis reshaped their sector of the industry, the lessons they learned from it, and how they’d respond if a similar crisis happens again.

Joan Fallon, founder and CEO of Curemark, a clinical-stage biopharma company that focuses on neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders, said the pandemic changed pharma by slowing down research and development.

“For example, when we would send a sample for testing, what normally took two to three weeks to complete took five to seven weeks,” she said. “Protocols changed, staffing was minimal, and the large industrial labs had new precautions and new rules to follow. This really slowed everything down.”

Desiree Gandrup-Dupre, SVP of information technology and care delivery technology services at Oakland, California-based Kaiser Permanente, told Healthcare Brew a big change the health system has seen is that patients are more willing to 

“Patients have embraced telehealth as an integral part of their care but not a replacement for in-person care,” Gandrup-Dupre said.

Today, more than 31% of Kaiser’s ambulatory care visits are done via telehealth, she added.

Brendan Carr, CEO of New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System, echoed the importance of incorporating technology into patient care, saying Covid “highlighted the need for healthcare delivery to modernize.”

“The office visits and hospitalization model is dated. A massive disruption will happen over the next decade,” Carr said.

Sandra Lindsay, VP of public health advocacy at New York-based Northwell Health (and the 

 in the US to get a Covid vaccine), told Healthcare Brew the pandemic highlighted the need to build public trust in the healthcare system through transparency.

It also “laid bare the deep inequities that exist across our communities, making it clear that we cannot achieve better health for all without addressing the 

Florian Otto, co-founder and CEO of health tech company Cedar, said he learned the importance of flexibility and meeting patients where they are, whether that’s through virtual or in-person channels.

“There’s much more movement right now…in terms of [patients’] financial situations, where they live. They’re much more willing right now to switch providers,” Otto said. “How to engage with each patient is way more important,” he added, as patients change jobs and health plans more often today than in the past.

If a similar crisis were to happen in the future, John D’Angelo—EVP, market president, and chief of integrated operations at Northwell—said the first step the health system would take is to make sure there’s strong communication between its hospitals, labs, and public health partners.

Lindsay said she’d place an even greater emphasis on health equity and making sure resources reach underserved communities. (Vaccine rollout to marginalized communities and rural areas was complicated due in part to patient hesitancy and distrust in facilities.)

“If we are to honor the lives lost and the sacrifices made during the Covid pandemic, we must commit to learning from those painful lessons—not just in theory, but in practice,” she said. “This moment in history taught us what’s possible when we come together, and we must carry that forward with urgency and intention.”

sign outside the emergency room telling visitors that masks are required to enter Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills

Healthcare execs on how Covid reshaped the industry 

Execs discuss the lessons they learned and how they’d respond if a similar crisis happens again. 

Following the inauguration on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump signed a slate of executive orders that took aim at areas of health policy, from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to artificial intelligence (AI) to drug cost cuts.

The changes could impact the healthcare industry, as the president has put his focus on a major international healthcare organization, stopped pilot programs, and potentially put millions of ACA members at risk of losing health coverage.

Michael Abrams, managing partner at health consulting firm Numerof & Associates, told Healthcare Brew that while Trump has rescinded these orders, it doesn’t mean he won’t make his own policies related to the ACA, drug pricing, or AI. 

“A lot of these [executive orders] that were signed on that first and second day and so on, are about clearing the decks,” he said. “There are things that Trump wiped away with those executive orders, not because necessarily they’re unimportant to him, but because he feels the need to start fresh.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

Here’s a rundown of what’s been signed relating to healthcare.

 The president signed an executive order to withdraw from the World Health Organization on 

, an international and reputable public health agency with over 190 member countries.

In a statement on Jan. 21, the agency posted to its website that it “plays a crucial role in protecting the health and security of the world’s people, including Americans, by addressing the root causes of disease, building stronger health systems, and detecting, preventing, and responding to health emergencies, including disease outbreaks, often in dangerous places where others cannot go.”

The WHO also said it hopes the US will “reconsider.”

Ashish Jha, who serves as dean of the public health school at Brown University and previously worked for the White House as a Covid-19 response coordinator, told 

 that pulling out of WHO could lead to more outbreaks of diseases across the world, including in the US.

 Trump also revoked executive orders signed by former President Joe Biden to expand access to ACA coverage.

The orders had lengthened enrollment periods and enhanced funding to help people sign up for ACA plans. As a result, the number of patients on these plans jumped to 24.2 million, more than double the number of enrollees in 2021, according to the 

It’s still unclear what Trump’s long-term plans are for the ACA, but Larry Levitt, EVP for health policy at KFF, 

 that “on the early [executive orders], Trump doesn’t show his cards.”

 The president also reversed a three-part Biden-era 

 aimed at reducing the cost of medications. The program consists of three pilots, including one to create purchasing agreements between states for gene and cell therapies.

This program, which was designed to prevent states from paying for ineffective medications, is already in progress, and states were instructed to apply through Feb. 28.

The other pilots were created to cut Medicare Part B costs for drugs with FDA accelerated approval and establish $2 copays on chronic condition generic drugs in Medicare Part D.

It is still unclear if the new administration will pursue any of these initiatives, according to 

 orders that had set up how the federal government could work together to respond to future diseases and sustain the public health 

Trump repealed Biden’s executive order that would have required health tech companies with sensitive data to report safety tests to the federal government. Biden’s executive order had also tasked federal agencies with setting standards to test AI risks.

 reported that some industry leaders found this order burdensome, but former Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy Micky Tripathi said the repeal won’t be significant, as he said the department is already doing things mentioned in the executive order.

Back view of Donald Trump walking on top of a cracked healthcare cross while holding a large scaled pen. Credit: Anna Kim, Photos: Justin Sullivan, Pool/Getty Images.

President Trump reverses Biden-era health orders in first week in office

President Trump signed a number of executive orders soon after taking office, including a WHO withdrawal and overturning ACA policies.

From the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, older patients have been more likely to become sick and die from the illness. In 2023, patients over 65 made up 

, according to research from the CDC’s Covid Hospitalization Surveillance Network.

But a new study out of Northwestern Medicine found that younger patients have experienced more severe symptoms of 

Long Covid occurs in some patients after they are diagnosed with the SARS-Cov-2 virus. It can cause symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, and shortness of breath, according to the Mayo Clinic. A number of studies estimate how many patients have been diagnosed with long Covid in the US since 2020, with 

 in the journal Annals of Neurology on November 22, found that in the 10 months following a Covid diagnosis, patients in age groups 18–44 (“younger”) and 45–64 (“middle age”) experienced more severe “neurologic symptoms” compared to patients aged 65 and over (“older”).

Fatigue, headaches, numbness, and smell and taste issues are among these neurologic issues, according to Northwestern Medicine.

The study reviewed data from 1,300 patients who tested positive for the virus, received care at Northwestern’s Neuro Covid-19 Clinic, and reported long Covid symptoms between May 2020 and March 2023.

Of these patients, 1,100 had mild cases of Covid and were not hospitalized for the disease. The younger and middle age groups made up 142 of the 200 patients who were hospitalized and 995 of the 1,100 patients who were not hospitalized.

In both age segments, however, both hospitalized and nonhospitalized patients reported more long Covid symptoms than those in the older age group. For example, nonhospitalized patients in the younger and middle age groups said they experienced on average five symptoms whereas older patients averaged four. Among the previously hospitalized patients, the younger group averaged six symptoms, middle age averaged five, and older averaged four.

Nonhospitalized younger patients also said they had experienced more issues with blurred vision, with 31.2% (169) of the younger patients and 33.3% (151) of the middle age patients having these symptoms compared to 24.8% (26) of patients in the older group.

Beyond neurologic symptoms, the younger (22.5%) and middle age (16.7%) hospitalized patients and younger (26.4%) and middle age (22.7%) nonhospitalized patients also reported higher levels of depression and anxiety. For comparison, 3.8% and 19%, respectively, said they had had these symptoms among older hospitalized and nonhospitalized patients.

Both younger segments also reported experiencing more chest pain. Among the hospitalized patients, 50% of the younger and 45.1% of the middle age groups experienced this symptom compared to 24.1% of the older patients. And 33.1% of nonhospitalized younger patients and 29.4% of middle age patients reported having had the symptom, in contrast to 19% of older patients.

A black silhouette of a head surrounded by clouds, a symbol of postcovid syndrome, brain fog.

Northwestern Medicine: Long Covid hits younger patients harder 

Symptoms like fatigue and loss of smell and taste are more common among younger patients, according to Northwestern Medicine. 

Younger patients are more affected by long Covid than older patients, study finds

The glory days of retail pharmacy may be over.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, retail pharmacies including CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Walmart saw increased foot traffic as customers flocked to the stores for medications and household items like toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Plus, with the help of government funding, chains earned billions from distributing Covid vaccines, collectively pulling in $7.5+ billion by the end of 2021, according to pharmaceutical research firm Drug Channels Institute.

CVS, for example, reported $66.9 billion in revenue at the end of its 2019 fiscal year. By the end of the 2021 fiscal year, that increased to $76.6 billion.

But things seemed to change for the sector by the end of 2022 when fewer people were getting Covid vaccines and tests. Rite Aid 

 last October, and CVS and Walgreens reported steep losses over 2024.

Experts say there are several factors, including changing consumer habits, increased competition, and a string of multibillion-dollar acquisitions that haven’t paid off.

“The pandemic really gave these companies a sense of false hope into who their customers were and what they wanted from a healthcare perspective,” Rajiv Leventhal, senior analyst in digital health at research firm eMarketer, told Healthcare Brew.

Retail pharmacies are facing challenges as consumer shopping preferences change, according to Leventhal.

While customers used to buy many household items at a local pharmacy, they are increasingly turning online, as shoppers tend to spend where they get the best deal, Leventhal said.

Amid these shifts, CVS and Walgreens revealed plans to reduce their brick-and-mortar footprints. In October, Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth said in the company’s Q4 earnings that it’s looking to 

CVS announced it would close 10% of its 9,000 sites and is also considering 

 its assets, as its insurance arm Aetna’s recent poor financial performance has brought down the rest of the company.

 of bankruptcy in September and is now operating as a private company. The bankruptcy process allowed the company to eliminate $2 billion in debt, and they received an additional $2.5 billion in exit financing, the company announced at the time.

New digital entrants to the pharmacy market, including 

 and Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Company, are also challenging the status quo for traditional brick-and-mortar retail pharmacy companies, Rohan Kulkarni, executive research leader for global research firm HFS Research, said.

Amazon Pharmacy, which started up in 2020, has continuously added new services such as 