A Look Back: My First Year as the Inaugural Chief Health Equity Officer at CVS Health

Last year, I was so excited to join CVS Health as its inaugural Chief Health Equity Officer. Today, as I celebrate my one-year anniversary, I am proud to have spent the last 12 months working with such committed and passionate colleagues to advance health equity.  As a company, we believe that regardless of who you are, what you look like, how you worship, who you love or where you live, you should have the same opportunity to achieve optimal health.  

For me, this work is personal. I am a health disparity statistic, having almost died after the birth of my son 16 years ago. After a healthy pregnancy my labor was prolonged, and I ended up needing an emergency cesarean section. Afterwards I complained of severe headaches, but clinicians dismissed my symptoms. For three weeks I suffered with severe dizziness and headaches, to the point where it hurt to open my eyes, lean forward, or laugh. I finally made a desperate phone call to one of my own medical colleagues in the emergency department where I worked. I was immediately rushed to the emergency department for a CT scan and was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain bleed. In fact, I had so much blood in my head that my brain had started to shift downwards away from my skull. I had emergency surgery to save my life.  

This near-death experience reaffirmed my calling to be a champion for health equity. I don’t take my life for granted, especially knowing that African-American women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. Factors like variation in access to quality health care, structural racism, and implicit bias contribute to these disparities.   

For me, this role is not just a job, it is core to my personal purpose of improving the health of the most marginalized communities. I’ve had the honor of doing that as a governmental health executive addressing some of this country’s most pressing challenges, as a practicing emergency medicine physician who still sees patients, and now with this incredible opportunity at CVS Health, where we touch millions of lives every single day. To be able to impact lives at scale is an incredible honor and responsibility I don’t take lightly.  

Bringing our heart to every moment of your health 

It took centuries for health inequities to develop, and there is no singular program or quick fix to eliminate them. Instead, health equity must be embedded in everything we do. Health equity is simply a way of doing business at CVS Health. I am excited about our health equity strategy, focused on three foundational pillars.  

Supporting health equity by engaging our colleagues 

Our colleagues are foundational to our ability to advance health equity. That means we are committed to working to understand health disparities amongst our own colleagues and empowering them to advance health equity in everything they do. We’ve already embarked on this journey, with our Health Equity Learning Series that we launched earlier this year, and our collaboration with the Groundwater Institute to provide health equity training for champions across the enterprise. We will continue to assure every colleague has the tools they need to provide culturally responsive care and services.      

Understanding our customer and client health care needs

It is important to understand how our communities are experiencing health and the barriers they face. We are implementing a strategy to truly understand health outcomes for our customers, clients and members through comprehensive health equity dashboards that can be used to expand and improve our policies, programs and services. This customer-centered approach is critical to advancing health equity.   

Leveraging our wide range of capabilities and reach 

Health equity is a team sport, and collaborations with communities and other partners are important to increasing access to health care, closing care gaps, and improving overall well-being. Earlier this year, we launched Health Zones, and are working in local communities to address social determinants of health and reduce  barriers to accessing care. We are focusing on equitable access to products and services for women through our recently launched Healthier Happens HERe initiative. Through Project Health, we offer no-cost biometric screenings to help people identify chronic illnesses early. We will continue to advance strategic collaborations to advance health equity goals, and will be particularly focused on equitable outcomes in heart health, mental health, and women’s health.   

 Our path forward 

The past year has been exciting and I am thrilled about the progress we’ve made in helping to advance health equity as a company. But we can’t do this alone. To me, success is not about the number of programs or initiatives that we launch. Success happens when we collectively work together across government, business, nonprofits, and communities to improve the trajectory of health in this country. We should all strive to accomplish tangible improvements in health outcomes for all people and eliminate disparities.  

I look forward to the difficult, but meaningful work that lies ahead and all that we will accomplish together.