Karen S. Lynch
President and Chief Executive Officer, CVS Health
Our results demonstrate the value of our integrated health solutions that leverage our deep health care expertise, portfolio of assets, and vast consumer touchpoints.
Strong execution led to success in our foundational businesses. The Health Care Benefits segment increased membership and revenue, delivering nearly 9 percent total revenue growth. This was driven by notable strength in Government Services and particularly Medicare growth, which experienced increases across all our product lines. Total Medicare Advantage membership grew 9.8 percent, with more than 265,000 new members added in the year, exceeding our initial growth expectations.
The Pharmacy Services segment also surpassed expectations, with full-year adjusted operating income growing more than 20 percent.* Our industry-leading management of drug cost trends, along with premier service and scale, helped fuel our record selling season of nearly $9 billion in net new business wins for 2022. Specialty Pharmacy continued to be a key growth driver, delivering revenue growth of 9.3 percent.
Our Retail/Long-Term Care (LTC) segment became the leading resource for testing and vaccinations throughout the pandemic, serving as a community health destination for millions of Americans. Last year, we administered more than 32 million COVID-19 tests and more than 59 million COVID-19 vaccines. Revenue grew 9.8 percent to just over $100 billion, marking an important milestone. Pharmacy sales and prescriptions filled both increased by nearly 9 percent, and front store sales outperformed as we successfully managed supply chain and labor challenges. We evaluated consumer health and buying needs, as well as shifts in the U.S. population, to create a plan that reduces the density of stores in some markets while maintaining our national presence.
We have a strong foundation and are well positioned to realize the many opportunities to meet consumers’ health needs.
#4
on Fortune 500 list
85%
of U.S. population lives
within 10 miles of a
CVS Pharmacy
“Our unique collection
of assets gives us
the ability to
dramatically reshape
how consumers
experience their care.”
In December, we shared our strategy to unify our foundational businesses and the bold moves we are making to bring greater value to the people we serve. Key to this strategy is advancing our care delivery and health services capabilities.
CVS Health has been involved in delivering health care services for years in communities, virtually and in peoples’ homes. We offer acute, episodic care through our CVS Health retail clinic locations, as well as condition-specific care support through our clinical programs designed to address health issues such as diabetes, kidney disease, and obesity. We also provide health services in the home with personalized care for some of the most complex medical needs.
We are continuously innovating and evolving community-based care delivery, with our CVS HealthHUB® locations offering urgent care, mental health services, and more comprehensive primary care. Our HealthHUB locations exemplify our integrated omnichannel approach, combining face-to-face and digital points of care to meet consumers how and where they want.
We are advancing our care delivery and health services capabilities by shifting the model to be even more centered on the consumer, including multidisciplinary an individual’s health and long-term goals. Deeper levels of engagement enable us to better manage the health outcomes and cost of care for the populations we serve.
Our community health locations play a powerful role in closing the gaps in care for all Americans, offering a convenient destination for the 85 percent of Americans who live within 10 miles of a CVS location. For the highest risk patients, with complex medical and social needs, we can provide care where they best need it: in the home. For almost everyone, our virtual care offerings offer speed, simplicity, and access, and in 2021, we supported 19 million virtual care visits across CVS Health.
We are simultaneously setting a new standard for digital health care for consumers. We forged new relationships with digital health innovators and have invested significantly in seamlessly connecting patients, their records, their doctors, hospitals, and other medical support.
CVS Health is uniquely positioned to play an integral role in offering affordable and convenient health solutions. We are connecting these channels, experiences, and care teams across the health care system to deliver better health outcomes.
Importantly, we consistently achieve our goals with a commitment to sustainable business practices. It’s our responsibility to ensure a healthier planet and healthier people for generations to come. We believe that our success depends on our diverse and inclusive workforce. In 2021, 58 percent of new colleagues and 51 percent of our overall workforce self-identified as racially or ethnically diverse, more than twice the average of the U.S. population.
We advanced health equity within each of our businesses and hired our first Chief Health Equity Officer. Our efforts were clear through our COVID-19 response, where more than one-third of vaccines administered in our CVS pharmacies were to members of underrepresented communities.
Our leadership in setting aggressive sustainable business targets is being recognized. We are proud to have been among the first seven companies globally to have net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets validated by Science Based Targets initiative and to have been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index for the ninth year in a row.
“Growing to become
nation’s leading health
solutions provider with
assets and strategy
to achieve low
double-digit adjusted
EPS growth by 2024.”
~40 million
unique digital customers
101
straight quarters
of dividends paid
We have been thoughtful and deliberate in setting our vision and strategy for the future, creating a pathway to achieve low double-digit adjusted EPS growth* over time. You can expect CVS Health to deliver strong sustainable growth in our foundational businesses and additional growth from our new initiatives. We will also drive meaningful cost improvements, generate powerful cash flow, and deploy that capital strategically. We recently increased our yearly dividend by 10 percent, from $2.00 to $2.20, and for the first time since 2017, our Board has authorized the company to begin repurchasing up to $10 billion in CVS Health stock. Our financial profile is strong: we generated nearly $18.3 billion in cash flow from operations in 2021, representing approximately 15 percent growth, and ended the year with $9.4 billion of cash and cash equivalents on hand.
We are a consumer-focused, purpose-driven company. I believe that our purpose and our people are our competitive edge. They are a key reason CVS Health so successfully navigated through such a challenging year. We have strong momentum into 2022. With our unique portfolio of assets, financial strength, consumer focus, and deep health care expertise, I am confident we will deliver for our members, clients, patients, customers, and stockholders.
In closing, let me thank our approximately 300,000 colleagues for their dedication, hard work, initiative, and innovation. And let me thank you, our stockholders, for investing in us. I look forward to another successful year.
Sincerely,
Karen S. Lynch
President and Chief Executive Officer
April 1, 2022
