Tony Ambrozie on AI, Digital Health and the Future of Pharmacy

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Hello, and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. My name is Chanel Bunger, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Tony and Rosie, the Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Technology Officer Pharmacy at CVS Health Enterprise and Health 100. It joins the podcast today to share insights and news background, healthcare, transcees, keeping an eye on, and a bit more. Tony, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm different than I do. Of course, of course. Well, it's great to have you to get us started out. Would you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your work in healthcare? So I'm currently the, as you described, I am responsible for the digital product, engineering for all things, pharmacist systems that deal with real, with physical medications across CVS Health, which obviously is a super important thing for our patients and consumers. I also have responsibilities for a new endeavor that, I mean, we may be talking later called Health 100, which is a separate subsidiary of CVS Health, that is focused on consumer engagement, digital engagement. I've been here for about three years or most, and then before that for about three years, this is where beckers and I and Scott and I have met, I was the similar role to digital and information officer that they well known hospital system in South Florida. So if you count the years, I've joined, I've moved into healthcare in the middle of the pandemic in the fall of 2020. And I think it was one of where you were your previous podcast that we did together, or basically somebody said, you moved from Disney, which is the, I spent the seven years before to healthcare in the middle of the pandemic, in the sense of what were you thinking, but I was exactly the right thing to do with all the needs for digital and now more than that with AI, that healthcare has. So before that, Disney for about seven years and before that American Express for 12 years, and all focused on consumers, customers, members, patients, whatever, whatever you want to call them. So just in case you're wondering about this finance, entertainment, then healthcare, I usually go where I believe the biggest opportunity for change in transformation is, and clearly healthcare, not serious in particular, but clearly healthcare as an industry as an ecosystem probably could benefit from folks like myself coming from other industries with a intense focus on consumer experience. Whether I find these opportunities or they find me, that's still an open question. Love it. Thank you so much for that introduction. And now before we go any further, can you give us a sense of health 100 in the mission there? Oh, so it's what we want to do is solve a number of somewhat problematic issues in healthcare. One is associations, grow patients of one kind or another, all our information, medical records and insurance and pharmacies all over the place. So if you think about a relatively simple healthcare journey, that starts with how I have a pain, then I go to see a doctor, maybe they send me to another doctor, especially maybe some labs, maybe MRI and maybe some medications. In that journey, I just described in like five seconds, there are probably multiple places where that information, my information is. It's all truncated for the purpose of that particular silo, right? And then it's a challenge for me and for us as a patient to put all that together. And if you multiply a journey like this with a major journey, that one would have some shorter, some longer, it becomes a lot of homework for a patient to see everything in one place. So that's one thing that we want to solve with a health 100, the consumer engagement part, which is bring all this information together, right? And that's enormously valuable, it's for ourselves as patients to kind of see it all in one place. It's very valuable when we have this information and we can go and the next doctor that we see, we don't start with, you know, that paper clipboard with 50 questions that most people don't remember the questions for, are you, have you ever been allergic to blah? I can't remember that, right? So that's where this, this information is data here that belongs to me as a patient or in the consumer. I can share it with whoever needs it in the process of my hair and things become, become easy. Now if we layer on something like AI, I would say a very well thought through AI that you can then look at all these multiple points, data points and whether it's longitudinal or transversal, very likely we could be seeing something that individual data points don't show a story. You know, it's just a this going up, whatever the measurement is or the lab is plus dad going down, the other going sideways, that's probably an interesting signal that individual look at looking at these three things individually probably we're not seeing. That's a huge deal. And the more of these measurements and visits and whatever it is, they are the more signal I believe is there, but it gets simply not detected because you know, participants in this journey and providers in this journey tend to have limited access to just a small part. Sometimes that small part is, you know, bigger than a equal, right? So that's that's a that's a huge benefit. And what we want to do with this is not we call this the front door to help here, trusted from door to help here, which means we want this to be this consumer engagement platform app web to be the place where people go when they have a need they go in and then somehow either we help them in there, obviously, I'm talking about consumer engagement. This is not a doctor of any kind, certainly not a doctor, but at least we provide if nothing else, we provide the guidance, where to go next, what to do next. So they're not abandoned in the middle of a problem with what do I do next? Where do I go? Who do I see? So these are some of the big aspects of what we're trying to do. Of course, as I said in that journey, clearly, pharmacy is important. So how do you do, do I get the drugs, the medications? How do I manage that? How do I manage my my prescriptions, the best way possible? And then of course, is the insurance? How does that fit in order to, you know, for me as a patient and get the best benefit? One thing I would say is this consumer engagement is not just for CVS customers, it's open to anyone. And of course, the more partners we bring into the psychosystem, whether it's payers, that has insurance companies, whether it's pharmacies, et cetera, et cetera, the more richer the psychosystem is, or the benefit of the consumers. Got it, got it. Thank you so much. And now that we have a sense of your background and the mission of health 100, kind of broadening out the conversation a bit, can you talk about the trends that you're currently watching either in digital health pharmacy or just health care overall? So one thing I need to kind of link to what I was just describing. One thing is a, it's an interesting trend, it's a great trend. As we, and frankly, yes, that we includes me only in the last six years, I appreciate that a lot of others have been talking and working on interoperability, which is the ability for a patient data to be exchanged between players that needed in the course of that patient journey. I think in the last year, so when I give CMS a lot of credit on this, we have made a lot of progress. A lot of progress, obviously you can read about it, but I think we made more progress in the last year than in the last of the previous five years. Because it's very important when doctors and insurance companies and pharmacies and the patients themselves don't really have that view of all the pieces of information that this patient, me as a patient, have, that's a problem. So it's a great, it's a start of the first, frankly, the first year of probably multi-year process, but it's a great thing. And yes, we can talk about other things, but this is a very concrete element that is happening here, lots and lots of participants. Lots of participants as I describe all these companies, they have all their role to play, and so getting everybody on board, it's a journey, it will be a journey, but I think as a patient, if I look at what's happening for my own selfish benefit as a patient, it's wonderful. Absolutely, and now you've already spoken a lot about what you're most focused on currently, but if you were to narrow it down as we close out 2026, what are you most focused on and excited about? So here is the, and obviously we cannot not have a conversation like this without me or you or both talking about AI and everybody's talking about it, but sometimes that those conversations are not very focused and they're not focused necessarily on safety and are not necessarily focused on outcomes. Good outcomes for consumers, patients, members, whatever you want to, we want to call them. So that's the very important thing, and I mentioned a little bit earlier on Health 100 is just bringing all this data in one place is wonderful, we've never had it, we're starting to have it that's wonderful, but now there's a lot of data for somebody like a patient, the consumer to make sense of. And a lot of it is in very medical terms, so, you know, reading a after visit somewhere is usually a exercise or used to be an exercise and checking on Google, translating a rule from those medical terms to something that we all can understand. I think this is where AI has the biggest, could have the biggest thing back again to make things intelligible, to connect those dots that otherwise are not easy. And also, and something very important is if you think about it, DCP's primary care providers have had the immense role in healthcare for a long time, you know, the way back to the family doctor and the small towns, huge, huge role, and that is they were able to try to coordinate the healthcare journey for a patient. Right, now that has become a lot more difficult because so many, so many players in that journey and also so many other complexities, yes, PCBs are still trying to do that, but they have a limited time and focus in an attention and bandwidth to do that, so now it's either them, but it's limited or the patient and there is also so challenges. I believe that AI can be that let's call it a care coordinator, don't call it the necessary, there's not a, and there's not a copyright term or going any kind, but it's something that kind of bulls all these things together and and track things and making sure, make sure that it's a good thing to happen for that particular patient. So this is where, yeah, I've done well again, is a net added value doesn't replace doctors, doesn't replace nurses, maybe replaces a lot of the homework that we have to do ourselves about our health, health, health, well being and well being, well, that's, that's a good thing, but it's something that doesn't exist is not being done. And there's a true opportunity for you to actually play a very useful role for the patients. That is definitely exciting and yeah, you can't have a conversation about health care without bringing up AI for sure, but now that you've shared what you're looking forward to looking back for a moment, what are you most proud of accomplishing over the last six to 18 months or so. Definitely bringing health 100 from an idea and some of us heads and as it makes sense, we did be good to something that is happening today. And this is something that when some of us started talking across CVS, including up to the executive leadership team CEO and even to the board. And I'm very pleased and frankly proud of CVS as a company and as a culture, that the reaction was, wow, this is a great idea, it would be very good for people, whether they're our customers or not. It would be, it would be making a bit difference sometimes the best of efforts by all the players, they're still broken or missing links between players and something like this could also give consumers the ability to mend or create those links in a way that's good for us. And so, very pleased with the reaction and the support inside and inside CVS, because we do want to do good things, we want to do change things as much as possible as much as a particular initiative or a particular company could do in this huge industry, complex industry, very fragmented the industry. And frankly, I'm not telling you probably anything that you haven't heard and you haven't known for a while, so although we solve, although we solve a little bit, maybe a little bit more, I don't know where this could go. But certainly, you know, huge support, which I'm very proud of, frankly, not for myself, but about CVS. And who knows where this could be in small steps, but who else where we'll all be. If we and others like us, because we're not the only ones, we'll be doing this, let's say in however, where we will be all be those patients and players in the healthcare ecosystem, who knows where we'll be in let's say five years. Hopefully in a much better ecosystem. Absolutely, and now as someone with all of your experience in and out of healthcare and who wears, frankly, a lot of hats, I'd be curious to hear what advice you'd give to evolving leaders looking to have the same impact and drive in their careers as you have. Well, it's funny because this is, you know, leaders in leadership is the focus of my second book. The first one I wrote three years ago was doing digital. And yes, there was an AI in there. Well, now I came back to a theme that I've always wanted to talk about because it's been the hardest journey I've ever taken. You know, I've done product and I think I've been very successful at done technology. I believe there should be something that we're all, we're all still students of however long we've done this, but so there are answers in two ways, they're two parts, I would think, you know, the general things, you know, optimism, courage, drive accountability, these are all things that you've heard others talk about for a very long time, they're still important. And all of them are based on listening well, learning a lot, reading a lot constantly in order to make sense of what's what's going on with there is some years ago about digital doing digital my title of my first book or the cloud or any other technology, generic technology, right. So learning constant learning, constant processing, constant thinking about the topics are. is important. Now, the second part of my answer is going back to AI. We hear a lot and we read a lot and you at Decker's are very good at kind of atoning down some of the noise that exists in the ecosystem and in the industry. We hear about AI and you hear some folks is AI like a super intelligent toast to your plug it in the wall and everything will be different and everything will be wonderful and it's not like that at all. It's a powerful tool and it can help us solve some of our problems the way I described it earlier with that coordination. That's a problem that doesn't have solutions because we don't have those millions of PCBs. We just simply don't have them to do that for patients and it's needed so AI does and could do a lot of great things. Certainly not hacking into other people's companies as if we've seen open AI and drop it anywhere else that's not the good thing but the I think we as leaders at all levels we are more needed than ever and it's just these transformational moments where leadership shows, truly leadership shows and how we guided this transformation, where we take it, where we adjusted, where sometimes we push back especially in the face of unreasonable expectations of things. Remembering that what we do where there's leaders or as companies or as countries is about people, not technologies, not tools and therefore we have a huge responsibility for to our teams, the folks that work with us and our companies and our local communities and our nation to guide this incredible piece of technology in a way that benefits the most folks the most of the time. And it's funny because those last two statements most people most of the time is what I used in years ago in digital is how do we build experiences that benefit most people most of the time and that's even true. With AI we as leaders must make sure that we evaluate the reality, the focus on them and keeping in mind the purpose of which is people whether it's our own people or the consumer or the customers, how do we guide all this and it's a huge challenge that all of us have to are responsible for. I love it. Well Tony that's a great note to end on. I want to thank you once again for your time today and for sharing your insights on the Becker's healthcare podcast. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Thank you.