Best Buy Sells Current Health, Pivoting Away From Hospital at Home

The announcement speaks to a subtle shift in the Hospital at Home strategy, and an understanding that care needs to be more integrated and personal

Sometimes the retail experience just doesn’t work out for healthcare.

Less than four years after acquiring digital home health company Current Health, Best Buy has sold the company back to its co-founder and former CEO, Christopher McGhee.

The move ends an interesting chapter in the Hospital at Home strategy that saw health systems like OSF HealthCare, Baptist Health, Geisinger, UMass Memorial Health, Atrium Health and Virtua Health use the ‘Geek Squad’ to set up patients for home-based care and handle daily monitoring.

In a message on the company’s website, McGhee pointed out that the Hospital at Home concept – as noted in a HealthLeaders The Winning Edge webinar this week – has been growing steadily.

“Compared to 2014, many more patients across the U.S. now have access to healthcare outside the hospital,” he wrote. “But, ultimately we are still in the early innings of the shift from hospital-based care to home and community-based care.”

The Hospital at Home concept focuses on delivering hospital-level care at home to certain patients who would otherwise be hospitalized, using a mixture of telehealth, remote patient monitoring and daily in-person care. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) model, called Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCaH), took off during the pandemic and now boasts close to 400 health system and hospital partners, with a pandemic-era waiver enabling participants to receive Medicare reimbursement.

While some healthcare organizations have developed their programs internally, using their own doctors, nurses and Mobile Integrated Health (MIH) programs to handle home visits, others rely on home health agencies or even vendors. Many outsource the technology part of the program, using companies like Current Health to evaluate patient homes, set them up with the right technology and handle daily monitoring.

Health systems who partnered with Current Health saw the relationship as a much-needed shot of retail strategy, and the idea of sending the Geek Squad to a patient’s home to set them up for home-based care was a good one, enabling the hospital to handle oversight and escalations and leave the daily monitoring to someone else. But Best Buy’s decision to get out of the home health business shows there is still work to be done.

Critics of the Hospital at Home strategy say the concept – particularly the CMS model - is too complicated, resulting in more costs and complexity than either the health system or the patient wants. They also question whether patients and their caregivers really want that much care in their homes, disrupting their daily lives and habits, and that those patients should be receiving care in a hospital.

Many of those invested in the Hospital at Home strategy say the program will go on with or without the Medicare waiver, which is set to expire at the end of September unless Congress takes action. But there’s also a lot of discussion that the program needs to evolve to become more sustainable, and that a Hospital at Home program will look much different in a year or two than it does today.

The Best Buy decision may force health systems and hospitals to look more closely at how that care is delivered to the home, and to consider a more personal approach.

With that in mind, some providers are either rethinking their approach to the home or putting more effort into working with patients and their families to make the program less intrusive. That would mean replacing the Geek Squad with a hospital-based (or hospital-supported) team.

In his letter, McGhee said Current Health will be “recommitting to our mission” and working on a platform that integrates healthcare with the home setting. That might come as a relief to patients who’d rather see their healthcare delivered by a health system rather than a Big Box store.