Dive Brief:

• CVS Caremark, one of the largest drugstore chains in the U.S., has joined the CommonWell Health Alliance, making it the only pharmacy retailer amongst the trade organization’s IT membership.

• The alliance was formed to promote and develop an open, vendor-neutral platform to enable healthcare data exchange and protect consumer health data privacy.

• The move comes shortly after the chain’s announcement to phase out tobacco sales this year. 

Dive Insight:

This move by CVS is a sign that the pharmacy retailer means business when it comes to developing its strength as a healthcare and wellness organization. It’s likely that both CVS and the CommonWell Health Alliance aim to take advantage of the Affordable Care Act’s incentives for streamlined healthcare information sharing and privacy — something in a sorry state in the current healthcare sector.

While CVS makes moves to bolster its health cred, the American Academy of Pediatrics recently warned against retail store health clinics for children, saying that they could interfere with the comprehensive care kids should be getting regularly from doctors. Though we don’t know what such clinics will look like in the future, its possible that they could provide convenient and less expensive healthcare for many. Certainly this is gearing up to be an interesting area of both retail and of healthcare, and CVS seems to be the first drugstore retailer to seriously knock at this door.