Why Best Buy Is a Home-Based Care Player Worth Watching

In 2019, when I began covering home-based care, Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) was just barely scraping the surface in the space.

Paying $800 million for the senior-focused technology company GreatCall was nothing to scoff at, of course. But it wasn’t directly related. It certainly felt like much more was bubbling underneath the surface.

In the interim, other retailers have been full-speed ahead on the home-based care mission.

Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA) put $6.2 billion behind the home-focused primary care company VillageMD. It has also made other investments in home health care companies like BrightSpring Health Services and post-acute technology companies like CareCentrix.

CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) has experimented with at-home kidney care and even flirted with the idea of getting into traditional home health care.

Within a short span, Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) launched its own in-person and virtual care platform – Amazon Care – scaled it, and even pitched it to large insurers as the next big thing in home-focused care.

Walmart (NYSE: WMT) has continually acknowledged the importance of the home in its health care plans, and has adjusted its strategy to account for that.

Now, Best Buy has joined the race as well. And it’s positioning itself not as an adjacent player, but instead, squarely in the mix.

The question is now: Will the company be riding the wave to the home, or driving the tide?

I answer that and more in this week’s exclusive, members-only HHCN+ Update.

A shifting strategy for the home

“I was approached by Best Buy Health, and they asked for me to come join their team to really break down the barriers of how care is delivered,” Diana Gelston, the VP of virtual care sales, marketing and client success at Best Buy, told Home Health Care News. “And so I joined just over a year ago.”

Gelston was previously the VP of sales and clinical consulting at Fresenius Medical Care. Before that, she helmed U.S. health care sales for Amazon Business.

Best Buy’s pitch to her was prescient. Six months later, the company acquired Current Health for a reported $400 million.

The Boston-based Current Health is the exact type of platform a company would buy if it wanted to make an expedited entrance to home-based care. Its digital platform – which includes remote care management, telehealth and patient engagement tools – helps health care providers across the U.S. deliver home-based care.

Of late, Current Health has partnered with the Dallas Based Parkland Health & Hospital System, the New York-based Mount Sinai Health System and the Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, among others. It also partnered with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which is part of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“Best Buy Health has a mission to help enrich and save lives through technology and meaningful connection,” Chris McCann, the CEO and co-founder of Current Health, told HHCN in October. “As I’ve gotten to know their team, it became clear very early on that we shared a similar vision for the future of health care as well as a common understanding of the challenges of making the home a primary site of care.”

And Current Health is also not just tangentially related to the home-based care space. It is deeply embedded. It is also a part of Moving Health Home, a coalition started last year to advocate for favorable home-based care legislation in Washington, D.C.

Other Moving Health Home members include Amazon Care, Intermountain Healthcare, Amwell (NYSE: AMWL) and Home Instead.

“When I came here, I saw unique capabilities, a remarkable supply chain and the ability to scale a business to connect to the home and create a powerful virtual care experience,” Gelston said. “Think of what we offer from a Best Buy macro view – and the horsepower behind that – and then take that across the threshold, into the home, from a technology-enablement perspective. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

It isn’t just in-the-weeds executives like Gelston taking this leap anymore, either. The strategy has been vocalized from top down.

“A few of the pieces in this patient journey are still in development,” Best Buy President Deborah Di Sanzo said on the company’s Q4 earnings call. “[We’re] integrating The Geek Squad with Current Health, for example. But this is our direction. And you can see Best Buy is there for the patient with technology, support and connections to enable care at home.”

Di Sanzo reiterated this at the SXSW 2022 conference as well. Specifically, she cited that for a decade, retailers and others have been talking about the consumerization of health care, but it never came to fruition, truly, until the pandemic.

“It never really came,” she said. “Then the pandemic came and just took it home. Technology is moving into health, and health is moving into the home.”

Here’s the goal for Best Buy in the future, according to Gelston: connect patients to physicians, health systems and health insurers to provide – or facilitate – better outcomes through care in the home.

“It’s not caring for that patient, per se, but it’s enabling that care,” Gelston said.

So, drawing back to the prior question I posed, on whether Best Buy is riding the wave to the home or driving the tide. It turns out, in this case, it’s probably doing both.

For instance, CVS and Walgreens want to be intimately involved in driving the tide. They have the care delivery systems to do so.

Best Buy, on the other hand, is staying out of the hands-on care – for now. But its potential ability to enable care at a large scale is what could make it a very integral player in the shift to home-based care over the next decade.

As for future partnerships Best Buy has in the pipeline, or future acquisition targets, the company is keeping its lips sealed. But it did not rule out the possibility that its home-based care strategy includes a pipeline that’s ready to be capitalized on.

“We have a very formal business development rigors and processes,” Gelston said. “But you know, we’re always trying to build that ecosystem to make people as successful at home as possible with technology. So whether it’s through partnerships or not, I think that that’s what we’re trying to do – really fortify that ecosystem around the patient within their homes.”