Your toddler wakes you up in the middle of the night, pulling her ear. So you pull out your handy iPhone otoscope, pop it in her ear, shoot a video, and promptly send it out for diagnosis…to CVS.
That’s the plan for someday, at least, as the $140 billion retail pharmacist unveiled its new Digital Innovation Lab near the Prudential Center in Boston last week. The company says the Lab will help it bring out smart device-driven apps and devices to improve health care.
“We’re going to invent things here that don’t exist anywhere on the planet, things that can be focused on what truly matters: our health,” promised Brian Tilzer, CVS Health’s chief digital officer. “We’re using digital to change health outcomes of millions of Americans.”
The late-night-toddler scenario? Lab manager Andrew Schwartz demonstrated this on his boss, using a CellScope Oto Home. It took less than 10 seconds to take and transmit the image.
The boss in question–Andrew Macey, CVS Health’s vice president of digital strategy–was quick to temper enthusiasm by admitting that, although CVS already has a working prototype, it still needs to figure out things like whether customers will buy otoscope attachments for their phone, and, since its Minute Clinics aren’t currently open 24 hours, whether parents will find it useful.
The otoscope is just one such device being tested. In the Lab’s main collaboration space is a shelf filled with glucose monitors, blood pressure gauges, and other home health care products and prototypes.
The 12 tools CVS Health will make available are less cool, but might be more useful. One lets you scan your insurance card and send it to CVS, so that your insurance information is up to date (in the future, it might offer customers a digital insurance card). Another lets you scan the barcode on the back of your driver’s license to automatically fill out the 10 fields required for ordering a prescription from CVS. A third is an app to send prescription and other notifications to the Apple Watch.
