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WOONSOCKET — Advancements in technology and a robust enterprise resiliency framework help CVS Health to deliver support to patients, members and customers when it’s needed most — including during extreme weather events.
Geographic Information System (GIS) technology is at the heart of how the company delivers this support. It turns large geographic data sets into easily digestible insights and user-friendly graphic visualizations, allowing CVS Health to make informed decisions quickly in urgent situations. Combined with data on weather, wildfires, seismic activity and other third-party information, this system becomes a powerful tool for identifying people and CVS Health facilities potentially impacted by adverse events.
One way that weather-related incidents can have a clinical impact is the potential for interrupting access to prescription medications. Over six out of ten adults in the U.S. take at least one prescription medication, and it is well-known that adherence to a medication plan is important to achieving the desired outcomes.
CVS Caremark Mail Service Pharmacy and CVS Specialty use GIS technology to ensure critical medications get where they need to on time — patients’ homes, providers’ offices, and our retail pharmacies — without weather interruptions. This is particularly important given that some medications, including many specialty medications, require refrigeration.
In 2024, during Hurricane Beryl, GIS technology allowed CVS Health to protect packages containing prescription medications across over 1,200 of the most impacted ZIP codes.
With help from GIS, CVS acted quickly during Hurricane Beryl, rapidly responding by transferring prescriptions from affected to unaffected pharmacies, deploying over 40 generators, mobilizing refrigerated trucks to preserve cold-chain medications and working with local organizations to deliver on-the-ground support to our customers.
During the record-breaking heatwaves of the summer of 2024, Aetna used GIS technology to identify Medicare Advantage members facing extreme heat, enabling care managers to reach out and offer education and support.
The company also uses the same framework to support their colleagues. In a six-month period, our enterprise resiliency team captured more than 3,500 incident alerts with a high degree of accuracy using GIS technology, resulting in more than alert notifications to colleagues to warn them of potential emergencies. GIS technology has also helped them track the locations of the wildfires in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Diego counties in near real-time and identify the ~12,000 colleagues residing in impacted areas to proactively outreach and assess their support needs.
The CVS Health app can help customers prepare for extreme weather conditions. Customers who use the CVS Health app can now receive push notifications to help prepare for poor air quality and snowstorms. Those who have opted in to receive notifications can click into the app for a curated list of products and content related to the weather. Learn more about the CVS Health app.
Weather and health are tied closely to one another. Building and enhancing their enterprise resiliency infrastructure allows them to serve people when they need it most during adverse weather events.
