Best Buy Acquires Remote Care Company Current Health

Best Buy acquired care-at-home company Current Health, supporting the electronics retailer’s ongoing push into the healthcare market.

Although Best Buy is well-established as a consumer electronics store, the company has begun turning to new areas such as home fitness and healthcare to fuel growth beyond its core technology business.

  • Current Health is a care-at-home platform that combines remote patient monitoring (RPM) and patient engagement tools into a single solution aimed at addressing the infrastructure gaps that obstruct providers from delivering care in the home.
  • Best Buy is best known as an electronics retailer with over 1k stores and 100k employees throughout the US and Canada. As televisions grow more affordable and people begin holding onto their smartphones longer, Best Buy is leaning into new services to drive revenue growth. 
  • The acquisition allows Best Buy to leverage its expertise in consumer-friendly technology and supply chain logistics to streamline care delivery, building on past investments in senior care (GreatCall) and RPM (Critical Signal Technologies).

Industry Impact

At-home healthcare has seen a post-pandemic surge in adoption, allowing patients to receive treatment where they’re most comfortable while simultaneously reducing costs. This trend has accelerated the reliance on the technology that Best Buy offers, but also gives the company a new way to take advantage of its large physical reach.

Best Buy’s existing services like Geek Squad and In-Home Advisors send trained employees into customer homes to provide personalized technology solutions while gaining the hard earned trust of consumers. By expanding this trust to Current Health patients, Best Buy can deliver a high-touch customer experience at a scale difficult to achieve for most pure healthcare competitors.

Remote Care Investment is Climbing

According to a Current Health survey of 250 health system decision makers, 81% expect their organizations to increase investment in remote care technology over the next year.

While home care was once a nice-to-have option for forward thinking providers, it is now a necessity for those looking to effectively care for high risk patients amid the ongoing pandemic.

Many health systems have already begun to adopt new remote care technologies, with 89% of respondents expanding its use over the past year, but the study suggests that care-at-home programs have more room to grow.

  • Investment Areas: Respondents indicated that they plan to increase investments in three main categories: home-based chronic care (64%), hospital at home (60%), and transitional care (58%). When asked about the key benefits of remote care in these areas, answers included reduced hospital admissions (69%), and improved patient (63%) and provider (62%) satisfaction.
  • Barriers to Success: According to those surveyed, the key barriers to remote care’s success are patient and provider engagement, workflow integrations, and operational concerns. Additionally, over 50% of respondents reported patient adoption and adherence as a challenge they’ve faced with care-at-home.

The Takeaway

As healthcare organizations transition from small remote care pilots to enterprise-wide strategies, new investments are addressing the long-term challenges of scaling to care for more patients with limited clinical staff. The technologies that are likely to find the most success are those that keep sight of patient engagement barriers without adding complicated workflows for providers.

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