CVS Health wants to do much more than fill your prescription or jab your arm with an annual flu shot.
The second-largest U.S. drugstore chain is buying Aetna, the third-largest health insurer, in order to push much deeper into customer care. The evolution won’t happen overnight, but in time, shoppers may find more clinics in CVS stores and more services they can receive through the network of nearly 10,000 locations that the company has built.
“They’ll be pretty much a soup-to-nuts health company … except for the hospital part of it,” says Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consulting and research firm.
Patients also may find the CVS-Aetna combination much more involved in managing their care, especially for those with expensive chronic conditions like diabetes. The bulked-up company also may gain more negotiating leverage over prescription drug prices, but it’s far too early to say how much or whether that benefit will trickle down to customers.
The $69 billion deal announced Sunday evening is expected to close in the second half of 2018 and will push the drugstore chain more forcefully in a direction it has been heading for years, Wall Street analysts say. The company, which stopped selling tobacco products in 2014 to further burnish its image as a care provider, already runs about 1,100 clinics and has been steadily expanding the health care it offers.
The combined company could add more clinics and expand in-store services to include eye care or maybe centers for hearing aids. That could gradually turn CVS into a one-stop-shop for health care, a place where patients can get a hearing aid checked, then see a nurse practitioner and pick up prescriptions.
“If you think about it, we actually don’t have anything like that,” says Jefferies analyst Brian Tanquilut.
