Best Buy CEO: At-Home Care Focus Is ‘Resonating with Health Care Industry’

Best Buy’s (NYSE: BBY) at-home health care focus has become a regularly mentioned topic for the company.

After purchasing Current Health – a well-known home-based remote patient monitoring (RPM) platform – for $400 million last year, the company has established itself among the likes of other top retailers that have become heavily engaged in the home-based care marketplace. 

That list of retailers includes CVS Health (NYSE: CVS), Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Walmart (NYSE: WMT).

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“In our Best Buy Health business, we are pleased with our first quarter momentum,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said Tuesday on a first quarter earnings call. “We saw strong growth in new sign-ups for our active aging business that offers health and safety solutions to enable adults to live and thrive at home.”

Prior to Current Health, Best Buy had also purchased the senior-focused technology company GreatCall for $800 million in 2019.

The Boston-based Current Health had made significant inroads prior to the Best Buy deal with some of the largest health systems in the U.S. that were looking to bring more care to the home.

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After the deal, a strategy that Best Buy had been looking to deploy for a long time came above surface.

Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the company benefited from consumers needing the technology to stay and work in their homes, a further push to help seniors age in place made sense.

“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,” Diana Gelston, the VP of virtual care sales, marketing and client success at Best Buy, recently told Home Health Care News. “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.”

Best Buy is now touting what it calls its “emerging virtual care business” and its ability to pair its existing infrastructure with the RPM technology it now has from the Current Health deal.

“We connect patients with their physicians to enable care at home,” Barry said. “The combination of Current Health offerings and our scale, presence and Geek Squad in-home capabilities is already resonating with the health care industry. Boosted by its affiliation with Best Buy, Current Health had its best commercial booking quarter ever, including expansion of its relationships with health systems such as Mount Sinai Health System, Parkland Health, as well as the UK National Health Service and others.”

Best Buy reported $10.65 billion in revenue in the company’s fiscal first quarter, an over 8% decrease year over year.

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