What You Should Know:
CVS Health and Microsoft announce a new strategic alliance to reimagine personalized care and accelerate digital transformation.
CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) and Microsoft Corp. (NYSE: MSFT) today announced a new strategic alliance focused on developing innovative solutions to help consumers improve their health while empowering over 300,000 CVS Health employees – including frontline workers – with tools to better serve more than 100 million people. The collaboration with Microsoft will help CVS Health accelerate a data-driven, personalized customer experience while complying with the company’s patient privacy and confidentiality policies.
Personalized Customer Care Experience
By combining information from different areas across the company with high agility, CVS Health will enhance its omnichannel pharmacy capabilities and deliver customized health recommendations when and where consumers need them. CVS Health will also scale up retail loyalty and personalization programs that use advanced Machine Learning models running on the cloud computing service Azure.
In addition to creating a more personalized and seamless experience for consumers, data science will also be used to improve access to care and health outcomes. The ability to create a simple, easy-to-use patient experience has been critical to CVS Health’s role in the national COVID-19 vaccination effort, delivering insights and recommendations to ensure equitable and efficient administration of approximately 43 million vaccines.
Other key initiatives of the strategic alliance include:
– Enabling Frontline Workers: Through the use of Microsoft Teams and Office products, CVS Health will be more agile, enabling retail employees to more easily consume key information needed to answer common questions and solve customer needs faster.
– Digitalizing Operations: Microsoft will continue to expand and partner with CVS Health to reimagine and simplify processes, as part of CVS Health’s technology-driven digitalization program.
– Expanding Cloud Services: As a strategic platform, Azure will play a key role in CVS Health’s acceleration of its digital transformation by expanding the company’s already formidable multi-cloud presence to over 1,500 new and existing business applications in Azure cloud.
– Innovative Solutions: Microsoft and CVS Health will also explore innovative technology solutions that will support consumers, employees, and ecosystem partners. Microsoft HoloLens, Dynamics 365 Guides, and Remote Assist can simplify complex procedures with intuitive tools to help support CVS Health employees. Microsoft Azure AI and cognitive capabilities can also extend to automate administrative and predictive processes and reduce waste through co-innovation with CVS Health’s deep community presence and health care expertise.
“We are excited to partner with CVS Health on its digital transformation journey, collaborating together on how the company manages health data at scale, improves the customer experience, and drives operational efficiency,” said Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s Chief Commercial Officer. “With the Azure platform and its AI capabilities, we will combine the power of data, the expansive reach of CVS Health’s world-class solutions, and Microsoft Teams to connect health care experts and create customized care and services that enable people to live healthier lives.”
