Veteran healthcare executive Heyward Donigan has been President and Chief Executive Officer of Rite Aid since August 2019. Rite Aid employs more than 6,300 pharmacists and operates more than 2,300 retail pharmacy locations across 17 states.
Donigan’s mission since joining Rite Aid has been to give customers access to their pharmaceutical needs right at their fingertips by video or text from their smartphones. Part of how she has accomplished this is with Health Dialog, which provides healthcare coaching and disease management services online and over the phone.
Despite being appointed to her leadership position just before the pandemic, Donigan already had plans in place to restructure the Rite Aid workplace.
“We had actually embarked on this before the pandemic,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post. “When I first got to the company, I said, ‘You can live anywhere you want.’ We established WebEx at the time and got everyone trained. I was hiring people from all over the country and allowing them to work from home and come in for meetings and collaboration. So when the pandemic hit, we were pretty well-prepared. As we saw the benefits of working remotely, we realized that this was an opportunity to become a more modern workforce and not debate whether we’re going back into the office.”
During the pandemic, Donigan took Rite Aid into other digital channels and platforms, such as Instacart and Door Dash. This has contributed to 50% growth in the last year, and another 50% projected for next year.
Donigan holds a Master of Public Administration degree from New York University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Virginia. Prior to joining Rite Aid, she served as President and CEO of Sapphire Digital, which designs and develops omnichannel platforms that help consumers choose their best-fit healthcare providers. Before that, she was President and CEO of ValueOptions, which was then the nation’s largest independent behavioral health improvement company. She also served as EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Premera Blue Cross, and, before that, as SVP of all operations at Cigna Healthcare.