Case Study: CVS Health achieves 6% improvement in medication adherence with Databricks

Personalizing the pharmacy experience to enable better outcomes

CVS Health, which serves roughly 80 million pharmacy customers daily across 10,000 stores, set out to personalize pharmacy experiences but ran into limits from diverse, unpredictable customer behaviors and a Hadoop environment that couldn’t scale. High data dimensionality caused overfitting, and physical hardware and storage constraints kept personalization experiments stuck at single-digit percentages of the customer base.

By moving to a cloud-based Azure Databricks stack (Delta Lake, ML, ETL) CVS centralized data, spun up elastic clusters, sped pipelines, and enabled cross-team experimentation and modeling. The platform powered targeted, timely offers and reminders—resulting in a 6% increase in medication adherence and more relevant, scalable personalization that supports better patient outcomes.

CVS Health

Raghu Nakka

Sr. Analytics Advisor