Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) is growing its at-home care efforts once again, this time through an expansion of its partnership with Geisinger Health System.
In July of 2022, Best Buy began leveraging its Geek Squad to help Geisinger better care for chronically ill patients in the home. Geisinger’s ConnectedCare365 initiative was first launched in 2021, and since then, over 1,1000 patients have been cared for via remote patient monitoring.
Best Buy’s Geek Squad delivers, installs and activates the remote patient monitoring technology in Geisinger patients’ homes. Geek Squad agents then educate patients on the technology and explain how to work better with Geisinger’s care teams remotely. Current Health – the at-home care technology platform that Best Buy acquired in October of 2021 – provides the technology.
Together, the two organizations have enabled “quicker access to care, better adherence and more positive outcomes for chronic care patients.”
“When looking at the challenges that faced health care systems when providing care in the home, we recognized early on that it really was a logistics issue,” Current Health CEO Chris McGhee told Home Health Care News in an email. “Knowing that, we felt that we could leverage the logistical prowess of Best Buy as a national retailer and bring these capabilities to the health space to solve for those logistical challenges.”
By connecting Current Health’s at-home care platform with Geek Squad agents, Best Buy has had the opportunity to make patients more confident with health care technology.
“After a lot of discovery and learning within the initial program where we implemented Geek Squad into Geisinger’s chronic care program, the results really confirm our hypothesis that Geek Squad can make a meaningful impact on enabling care at home,” McGhee continued. “This happens by supporting activation and adherence, improving the patient experience, and reducing provider burden – all leading to better clinical outcomes and cost efficiencies.”
Now that there is a proof of concept, Best Buy and Geisinger plan to expand the partnership to help more chronically ill patients. Those patients often have conditions such as congestive health failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), hypertension and diabetes.
As part of the program, patients receive blood pressure cuffs, body weight scales, thermometers and glucose meters “to monitor their health at home and transmit data back to their Geisinger care team” through Current Health’s platform.
The program’s results thus far include: a 50% reduction in the time from admission into the at-home program, down from 96 hours to 48 hours; a 19% improvement in patient adherence to care plans; and an 18% reduction in technical issues.
“We’ve had really great feedback from all the patients who have worked with the Geek Squad through this program,” McGhee said. “Through the work so far, patients have rated us a world-class NPS score of 89 when asked about their experience with Geek Squad visiting the home to get them set up on their chronic care at home program.”
Best Buy – like Walgreens Boots Alliance (Nasdaq: WBA), CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) and Walmart (NYSE: WMT) – is one of the retailers that has really honed in on home-based health care in recent years.
The company considers its at-home care investments “long-term” ones.
It also has worked on hospital-at-home partnerships, namely with Atrium Health.
“This is a space that has so much opportunity,” Karen Murphy, EVP, chief innovation officer and the founding director of the Steele Institute for Health Innovation at Geisinger, told HHCN in an email. “We are continuing to investigate ways we can extend our reach beyond the confines of traditional settings and bring high-quality care directly to the comfort of patients’ homes.”
Geisinger has 10 hospital campuses and a health plan with more than half a million members. It cares for more than one million people across the U.S.
As more patients want to be cared for in the home, Geisinger is shifting its strategy to meet as many patients as possible outside of their hospitals’ walls.
Best Buy hopes to capitalize off of that strategy.
“The results of our program show that when we combine what Best Buy is known for, technology support and expertise, with Geisinger’s best-in-class care teams and network of clinics and hospitals, we can make a meaningful difference in the patient and caregiver experience,” Best Buy Health President Deborah Di Sanzo said in a press release.
