Recognition, earned🏆
We’re a Modern Healthcare 2026 Innovators Award winner, and more news.
This month, we’re on a winning streak. CVS Health earned major industry recognition for work that’s quietly changing how health care runs at scale.
Our April issue also unpacks how we’re test‑driving digital twins, what our leaders are saying about AI and security, and why discipline — not flash — often matters most.
It’s officially awards season
Modern Healthcare named CVS Health a 2026 Innovators Award honoree, recognizing our Aetna team’s ACE (Adjusted Claim Enhancement) technology in the Operational Excellence category for processing 3.6M+ Medicaid claims in 2025, speeding up claim payments to providers and reducing administrative burden, which can ultimately free up time for patient care.
Built on agentic AI, ACE dynamically directs claims processing work based on live backlog priority and complexity. Think of it like traffic control for claims, keeping work moving efficiently and cutting turnaround times. In 2025, the results spoke for themselves:
Processed 3.6M+ claims
Saved 250,000 hours of administrative labor
Automated 1,700 rework projects
Cut claims turnaround time by 50%, speeding up payments to providers
Handled 11% of total Medicaid claims volume — freeing our teams to focus on complex, human-centered work instead of routine data entry
Modern Healthcare’s recognition — which in past years has honored organizations like Mount Sinai, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and AdventHealth — reflects the real-world scale of what our teams built.
“The ACE initiative brings together intelligent automation, AI-driven insights, and human-in-the-loop expertise to deliver measurable business outcomes,” said Manjusha Nair, Executive Director, Aetna Technology. “This recognition is a true testament to the bold, out-of-the-box thinking and relentless innovation our team brings to the table every day.”
Other recent wins:
Innovation worth its weight in gold: CVS Health’s AI-powered digital assistant for colleagues, “Artey,” was named a Reworked IMPACT Awards Gold Winner for Employee Journey Innovation. In its first year, Artey powered more than 1.5 million conversations, completed millions of automated actions, and saved an estimated 25,000 hours of colleague time, making space for more human-centered, high-value work.
Security at scale: Cyber Magazine named Alan Rosa a Top 10 CISO in the United States. Landing at number three on the list, Alan’s cybersecurity and infrastructure leadership keeps our systems secure, resilient, and ready to support care for the millions of Americans we serve.
Enterprise excellence: Aetna was recognized as a 2026 CIO 100 Honoree by Foundry. The awards celebrate 100 organizations that use technology in innovative ways to deliver real business value.
Test driving with digital twins
CVS Health is using generative agents — AI-powered simulations that act like real customers and patients — to test drive consumer experiences. These “agentic twins” are built from consented data and designed to behave like specific individuals, not statistical averages. The result is a way to pressure-test digital journeys, key messages, and service designs in a safe, simulated environment, surfacing friction early and helping teams understand not just what works, but why.
Sri Narasimhan, CVS Health’s Vice President of Enterprise Customer Experience and Insights, described agentic twins to The Wall Street Journal as “always on” compared with human research panels. “What I think was a really big unlock for us is we could go deeper,” he said. “It’s not like I have to stop with how many questions I asked. There’s no fatigue.” That depth allows teams to explore scenarios, follow up endlessly, and test ideas that would be slow, costly, or impractical to study with people alone.
Still, the goal isn’t to replace humans. “We’re never going to stop talking to real customers,” said Sri. Used this way, generative agents help teams learn faster, go deeper, and design with more empathy, so real-world experiences feel simpler.
Read more: Our work with agentic twins was also featured in Fierce Healthcare, CX Network, and IT Brew.
Why boring is beautiful
RSA is the biggest annual cybersecurity conference of them all, and this year in San Francisco, our CISO Alan Rosa talked about how security, privacy, and infrastructure work together to protect sensitive data while still enabling the business to innovate.
A key theme was discipline — security is at its best when it fades into the background (for users, at least). “Boring is beautiful,” Alan said. “In health care, you have to be consistent and careful.” And on the hot topic of AI? “We’re only going to invest in AI in places where we can demonstrate measurable value.”
Thanks for reading. Hope to see you again next month!
—The Incurgent 🤖