CINCINNATI — One family's journey with a chronic illness diagnosis shows how specialty care teams can help patients and caregivers navigate uncertainty and achieve a better quality of life.
Wendy Stacken's son Nick was diagnosed with an immune deficiency at 13 months old. For Stacken, the road ahead felt overwhelming — until a care team helped her family understand what that diagnosis really meant.
"When one doctor told us, 'Do you want him to live or do you want him to just survive?' we took it to heart. The home nurses, which were such a help, they helped us understand what an immune deficiency was, what the treatment meant, what every confusing thing about it was," Stacken said.
Today, Nick Stacken is a Special Olympics athlete, a milestone his mother credits in part to the support system built around him.
Lucille Accetta, chief pharmacy officer and head of specialty operations at CVS Health, said patients like Stacken benefit from therapies that are most effective when paired with comprehensive care.
"Nick has a very unique therapy, immunoglobulin, which is used for his immunodeficiency condition. And these therapies, research has shown that they've reduced hospitalizations by 50%, so getting on the right therapy quickly is really important, but it's important that they have that care team around them to support not only the patient but working in conjunction with the doctor and the family," Accetta said.
Aceta said CVS Health supports patients managing a range of complex conditions, including cancer, hemophilia, and immunosuppressant conditions, and provides additional resources beyond medication dispensing.
"At CVS we have the ability to not only dispense these medications for patients that have, you know, cancer or hemophilia or an immunosuppressant condition, but we also have additional resources, and that's what's critical," Accetta said.
For more information, visit CVShealth.com.
This segment, sponsored by CVS Health, aired on CINCY LIFESTYLE and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI.
