Are $59 Virtual Visits at CVS Health a Play for Women?

Last week we wrote about how CVS Health offering $59 telehealth video visits through the company’s retail medical clinic, MinuteClinic, would significantly change the health insurance market. This week, we are going a step further to consider the specific effects of the CVS Health offering for women.

As covered previously, CVS Health is looking to serve people with routine health needs who are shopping for lower costs. Who is doing that shopping? Primarily women. Women make “80% of the health care decisions for their families.” If the woman is a mother, surveys show more than 75% of the time, she is responsible for choosing a child’s health care provider and taking the child to health care appointments. Women who aren’t mothers are also often caregivers – nearly 50% of women without kids make health care decisions for a family member.

The combination of increasing deductibles – more than half of cost-sharing payments were in the form of a deductible for the first time in 2016 – and increasing need for health care at convenient times has already driven women to be the most likely users of retail clinics.

According to FAIR Health, in 2016, women accounted for a higher percentage of retail visits covered by insurance than men in nearly every age group. For people between the ages of 19 and 30 who visited a retail clinic, nearly 70% of visits were by women, as the chart below shows.

CVS Health, no doubt, already knows women are the primary users of their in-person MinuteClinics. Converting women MinuteClinic visitors to $59 telehealth visits shouldn’t be too difficult since women are the primary health care decision makers, and the virtual visits are cheaper and more convenient than going in-person to a CVS store.

Will other health care organizations follow CVS Health’s lead and start to cater more to women as health care consumers? Theirs seems like a data-driven strategy that other entities might be wise to emulate. Just as the $59 virtual visit will disrupt the health insurance market, the new CVS Health offering could also change the way the health care system meets the needs of the primary health care decision-maker in the U.S. – women.