Meet the girl overseeing a key piece of CVS Health's plot to fiddle taking into consideration how Americans profit healthcare

Meet the girl overseeing a key piece of CVS Health's plot to fiddle taking into consideration how Americans profit healthcare

Early in her moving picture, Karen Lynch was exposed to the healthcare system in the US.

When Lynch was 12, her mother killed herself. Later, her aunt, who was caring for Lynch and her siblings, was found to have lung and breast cancers and ultimately died from the conditions.

"When you have those personal deeds happen sufficiently forward in your cartoon, I had that mission and passion to be able to relief transform how people admission healthcare," Lynch, now 56, told Business Insider.

Lynch is now the president of Aetna, the health insurer that recently quantity once CVS Health. She says she yet draws a propos those experiences as she looks to transform healthcare.

Read more: Take a see inside CVS' adding health hubs that are a key part of its mean to bend how Americans acquire healthcare

Lynch started her career as a credited public accountant, which gave her a wide overview of the business world. She went virtually to spend much of her career at Cigna in the to the front living as an dispensation at Magellan Health Services, tapping into added aspects of the healthcare system including radiology and pharmacy.

She associated Aetna in 2012, leading the company's specialty products isolation and rising through the ranks in the past becoming president in 2015. After the quantity considering CVS, Lynch is now leading the Aetna matter in place of former CEO Mark Bertolini.

Bertolini seems determined that Lynch will go in the set against afield as portion of the newly compound company.

"She has every pension of opportunity to manage that company one daylight," Bertolini told Business Insider's Rich Feloni, referring to CVS, "and I think she can complete it, and I'm going to contract her in exasperating to enter upon that."

Lynch sees the merger of a health insurer as soon as a company that operates 9,800 retail pharmacies benefitting Aetna insurance customers for a number of reasons:

By linking occurring members to doctors in their communities, should members come in to a CVS MinuteClinic for an taking taking into account more who don't have a go-to primary-care doctor.
By helping members stay fan to their medications, behind the aspire that it can save them healthier.
By greater than before linking its members to resources that plus can behave their health, such as connecting a senior lover who may not be eating to nonprofits subsequently Meals upon Wheels that concentrate on meals.
By connecting members to behavioral health facilities, an aspect that's a passion of Lynch's. "As a collective company we can understand on where people are," Lynch said. "We can entry resources in the local community to make resolved we'occurring for connecting to the right resources suitably they are taking care of the mind in be taking into account to to their bodies."
She sees her role in transforming healthcare as finding ways to meet people where they are, whether that's in a CVS gathering in their communities, in their homes, or via technology.

Lynch said she's inspired by the appear in-lawsuit Amazon had finished as soon as its Amazon Go stores and was imagining ways CVS could apply same concepts to benefit patients improved control their health.

Read more: INTRODUCING: The 10 people transforming healthcare

Amazon has set going on Amazon Go stores in some US cities. The stores have one major difference from a typical convenience strengthening: They are cashierless. That means shoppers scan in through an app, and Amazon can monitor which goods the shoppers select taking place in the beautify. On the mannerism out, Amazon charges the shoppers for what they grabbed.

"Imagine what's attainable in the healthcare industry," Lynch said.

For instance, a follower who enters a CVS might be prompted to acquire a flu shot, told a prescription's neighboring to for pickup, or encouraged not to get a candy bar