“Kyu & A” with CVS Health’s New Chief Psychiatric Officer, Dr. Taft Parsons III

In recognition of Suicide Prevention Month, CVS Health is highlighting the programs and people helping us reach our goal of reducing suicides by 20% among Aetna members by 2025. I was pleased to sit down recently with our first ever Chief Psychiatric Officer, Dr. Taft Parsons III, who brings his unique skills and expertise to help us reach this goal. We discussed his experience before joining CVS Health, trends shaping the future of behavioral health care and his own personal methods to de-stress. I hope you enjoy this brief recap of our conversation!

Taft, while it’s been just a couple of months since you started, I know I speak for many when I say that we are so excited to have you on the team. Could you share more about your background and what led you to CVS Health?

Of course, I’m proud to be here and see my move to CVS Health as a natural next step in my career.

My medical training is in psychiatry. I began my career providing inpatient care at the Henry Ford Health System, which is a nonprofit health care organization in Detroit. I practiced at Henry Ford for over a decade, eventually becoming the Medical Director and Hospital Director of their freestanding psychiatric hospital. In this role, I oversaw all hospital operations and care processes, as well as workforce management.

After Henry Ford, I pivoted to the insurance sector, where I built my background in behavioral health offerings and started focusing on how behavioral health care coverage could be improved. Meanwhile, I continued to practice psychiatry until 2020 and always enjoyed interacting one-on-one with patients. In July, I joined CVS Health as its first ever Chief Psychiatric Officer, a move I am very excited about.  

I was drawn to CVS Health because of the breadth of our offerings and the opportunity to provide a better behavioral health experience for more people across the country. CVS Health offers many avenues to address well-being and deliver more effective mental health care. As Chief Psychiatric Officer, I’m excited to influence plan design, evidence-based clinical offerings, resources in our retail settings and beyond.  

I often talk about my own journey from practicing internal medicine and pediatrics to public health and now a health care business as moving from treating one patient at a time to one population at a time. What motivated you to make a similar transition?

When I was in medical school and residency, I could see the impact medicine can have on one person’s life. When I worked in hospital administration, I saw for the first time how a program that I oversaw could be rolled out across the health system and impact thousands of patients month after month.

Moving to the insurance side of the system in my previous roles and now working for a wide-reaching health care leader like CVS Health, enabled me to make beneficial changes to mental health care for tens of millions of people. With that scale comes new challenges and considerations, but I find it very rewarding to watch how a program you spent months working on, down to the sometimes-tedious details, comes to life and how it affects health outcomes on a big scale.

What is an example of one of the programs you implemented that you are most proud of? How will that shape your work as Chief Psychiatric Officer at CVS Health?

When I was at Henry Ford, I worked on an initiative that aimed to eliminate suicide across the 200,000 members enrolled in its owned insurance program. We began with the knowledge that most people who make a suicide attempt have seen a clinician within the previous four weeks – but most often, this clinician is not a behavioral health practitioner. We found people usually went to the ER or saw a primary care physician.

So, we rolled out a program that integrated behavioral health services in health clinics and primary care facilities focused on identifying and addressing the needs of people in crisis. The program was incredibly successful, and we were able to eliminate suicide across the plan’s 200,000 members for nine consecutive quarters. In addition to these amazing results, I was incredibly proud that our work served as a model for programs across the globe – from the various U.S. military branches, to the U.K. National Health Service.

CVS Health takes a similarly comprehensive approach to suicide prevention efforts on a national scale such as using self-harm predictive modeling to inform outreach initiatives, implementing universal mental health screening tests and creating suicide prevention training for clinicians. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to these very important suicide reduction efforts and tackling the challenges of delivering this program across multiple payer and provider networks.

Looking ahead to another new set of challenges, how did the pandemic change the state of mental health care in the U.S. and how will that influence your work?

It’s incredible. In one year, the pandemic changed the way health care, and particularly behavioral health care, is delivered more than in the previous decade. We paid more attention to mental health issues like isolation, anxiety and depression exacerbated by the pandemic and had better conversations about them. This helped people speak more openly about stress and mental health in a way they hadn’t before. While stigma still exists, some of the hesitancy to address these topics has been reduced.

The pandemic also rapidly increased the use of virtual care in behavioral health. Shutdowns meant many people were forced to try virtual solutions for the first time and many found it to be an easy, more convenient way to get care.  

Looking ahead, we now must focus on determining which digital solutions are the most effective and for which situations virtual care makes more sense. Patient preference will also factor more heavily into treatment. It’s understandable that a patient with a physical ailment might need to see a doctor in-person, but someone might be more apt to seek mental health treatment if they don’t have to drive 20 or 30 minutes to an appointment and take time off work. In the future, our work will be shaped by addressing these new challenges, providing care when, where and how it’s needed.

How do you personally cope with stress and what are some of the ways you practice mental health care in your daily life?

My wife and I enjoy collecting art—we’ve filled our family’s home with unique pieces found over the years and each has its own story. I find being in a home filled with art relaxing and calming. I also play soccer as a way to get regular exercise, which is really helpful for controlling and managing the stress of day-to-day life.

Welcome to the team, Taft! I look forward to working with you and partnering on our efforts to improve access to and quality of behavioral health care. All of us at CVS Health are grateful to benefit from your leadership and experience.