Karen S. Lynch is President and Chief Executive Officer of CVS Health, a Fortune 4 diversified health services company. Karen leads more than 300,000 colleagues who are passionate about transforming health care to be simpler, more convenient and more personalized.
Two years into her role as CVS Health‘s chief executive, Lynch has become the most powerful woman in business and set out to transform American health care.
CVS CEO Karen Lynch’s many feathers in the cap
In 2021, she was included on Forbes’ inaugural “50 over 50” list. She was recognized by Forbes as one of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women in 2020 and included on Business Insider’s Top 100 People Transforming Business list in 2019. From 2016 to 2020, she was named in the Fortune’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.
Karen serves on the board of U.S. Bancorp and is Chair of their Audit Committee. She is a trustee of The Bushnell Performing Arts Center and a member of the Global 50 and the Boston College Women’s Council. Karen also serves as a member of the Business Roundtable.
A graduate of Boston College and The Questrom School of Business at Boston University, Karen was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Becker College in 2015.
Karen Lynch’s as President of Aetna
When employees of the health insurance giant Aetna filed into the auditorium of their Hartford headquarters for a town hall meeting in 2015, they were expecting the usual fare: an upbeat talk about financial projections and strategy. But then Aetna’s new president, Karen Lynch ‘84, began speaking, and the meeting took a surprising turn.
Lynch, then fifty-one, had been named president of Aetna a few months earlier, having joined the company in 2012. Coworkers viewed her as warm and plainspoken, but also slightly guarded about her personal life. Even close colleagues said they knew little about her upbringing or personal history. That was about to change.
Lynch’s mothers suicide due to depression has been the reason for her being so passionate about medical health care. For Lynch, her mom’s life might have turned out differently if she’d had access to better medical treatment, or if there’d been less stigma and shame about getting help for depression.
Aetna’s merger with CVS
Lynch’s ability to deliver on her vision for expanding access to health care has only increased in the years since she began opening up about her family’s tragedy. In 2018, Aetna completed a $69 billion merger with the pharmacy giant CVS Health, forming a health care colossus, and in 2021, Lynch became its CEO. In 2021 the company had $292 billion in revenue, and today has over three hundred thousand employees and nearly ten thousand stores. CVS Health ranks fourth on the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest companies—and is the highest ranked U.S. company ever run by a female CEO. In 2021 and 2022, Fortune magazine placed Lynch in the top spot on its annual Most Powerful Women in Business ranking—a position that reflects, in part, how she wields her power to shape not only her company, but the world, in a positive way.
CEO Karen Lynch’s ambition for CVS Health
Lynch’s ambition for CVS Health is to become a one-stop location to get people healthy: Its insurance arm helps people pay for care, its pharmacy provides medicine, while its in-store health care centers, which it calls MinuteClinics and HealthHUBs, treat patients. CVS’s recently announced approximately $8 billion acquisition of Signify Health, which provides in-home care. This was Lynch’s first big deal as CEO.
Lynch changed the vision of CVS within one year of her joining. With the world emerging from a multi-year pandemic in which millions of people relied on CVS for vaccinations and Covid tests, Lynch is determined for the company’s role in how Americans receive medical care to grow even further.
From waitressing to one of the most powerful women in business
So how, exactly, does an orphan who relied on scholarships, student loans, resident assistant positions, and waitressing jobs to get through Boston College—and someone with no pharmaceutical training—become head of the world’s largest pharmacy chain, and top the Most Powerful Women in Business list?
There were many people who influenced Karen in big way to help her in her journey. Lynch distinguished herself with her work ethic.
After college, Lynch joined Ernst & Whinney, the highly regarded public accounting firm.
In 1989, Lynch stepped off that path when her aunt who had raised her after her mother’s death was diagnosed with cancer. Lynch moved to Ware, Massachusetts, to become her primary caretaker. In addition to her mother’s suicide, experiencing her aunt’s long illness catalyzed Lynch’s vision for her career.
For 18 years, Lynch navigated between jobs within Cigna including roles in accounting, finance, and HR. By the early 2000s, she’d won a plum role running Cigna’s dental insurance business her first time being personally responsible for a unit’s profit-and-loss statement, a developmental milestone that’s necessary for anyone who aspires to become a CEO.
Along the way, she picked up an MBA at Boston University. She was president at Magellan, an Arizona-based health care management company where she worked from 2009 to 2012. Lynch was lured to Aetna by its then-CEO, Mark Bertolini, a colleague from her Cigna days. Aetna acquired the health care company Coventry in 2013, and Lynch was tasked with leading the integration. The Coventry deal proved a success, however, and by 2015 Lynch had been named Aetna’s president.
Following Aetna’s merger with CVS in 2018, the CVS board asked Lynch to continue running the Aetna division. In November 2020, when CVS headquarters in Rhode Island was still shut down due to the pandemic, Lynch was chosen as the CEO. This gave Karen the opportunity to really have an impact on the medical health care system through CVS.
Karen Lynch’s routine as CVS Health CEO
Much of Lynch’s day-to-day work involves energizing a sprawling workforce to make that vision a reality. Despite the status and visibility that come with her position, Lynch comes across as approachable and even disarming when compared with other CEOs. Lynch schedules regular videoconference meet-and-greets with mid-level employees. Karen likes to hear directly from colleagues. She’s a CEO that people very quickly are comfortable talking with, and that’s unusual. They’re not afraid of her.
Karen Lynch’s future plans as CVS CEO
Lynch has been candid that the next step in her strategy is to acquire primary care capabilities—that is, to buy a company employing full-fledged physicians. The plan is to have its physicians offering appointments as early as 6 a.m. or on weekends, increasing access and convenience. Karen Lynch wants CVS Health to also continue with its digital transformation.
Lynch’s vision for CVS Health
When Lynch talks about her growing vision for CVS, there’s one statistic she refers to frequently: Before Covid-19 hit, CVS’s MinuteClinics had done 9000 telehealth psychiatric appointments. Since the pandemic hit, they’ve done nearly 30 million. It’s not a stretch to imagine that at least one of those appointments may have prevented a family from experiencing the kind of childhood tragedy that’s become the animating force in Lynch’s career.
