Best Buy Health is teaming up with yet another health system to help augment home-based care services. What’s of note, however, is that in Best Buy Health’s partnership with Mass General Brigham, it will also be aiding in the Medicare-certified home health arena.
The two organizations announced the collaboration Wednesday.
In addition to a home health arm – which is the largest home health business in New England – Mass General Brigham already has a robust hospital-at-home program. The program currently has a capacity of about 33-40 beds and a combined daily census of 25-plus.
The goal is to get to the point where hospital at home represents 10% of inpatient care being provided by the health system at a given time, Dr. Stephen Dorner, the chief clinical and innovation officer at Mass General Brigham Healthcare at Home, told Home Health Care News.
Best Buy – which has been very involved in home-based health care of late – also partnered with Atrium Health earlier this year. It owns the home-based care technology company Current Health, which has other longstanding relationships with health systems working on hospital-at-home programs.
“More people than ever before are comfortable with the idea of receiving care in their homes, but we know that bringing care across that threshold isn’t as easy as it sounds,” Best Buy Health President Deborah Di Sanzo said in a statement. “Together, Best Buy Health and Mass General Brigham will create long lasting solutions that will support the rapid growth of the care at home market and all of those who play key roles in delivering quality care in the home to patients who need and deserve it.”
Best Buy said the partnership furthers its commitment to “enabling care in the home for everyone.”
Both organizations believe that the partnership will help improve outcomes and ease staffing constraints.
The first priority is to expand hospital at home for Mass General Brigham. Ultimately, though, all of its home-based health care will be supported by Best Buy Health, including home health care.
“As we have grown our Home Hospital service, it has become clear that we need a concurrent evolution of the solutions and processes to support home-based care delivery at scale,” Dorner said. “We conducted a market assessment to identify the best platform to facilitate the connection between our patients and their clinical teams. It was clear that Best Buy’s Current Health platform offered a best-in-place platform to facilitate that connectivity due to the technology, but we also found that the broader vision of the future of health care shared by Best Buy Health and Mass General Brigham was clearly aligned. We both believe that the future of healthcare is in the home and have a shared commitment to build that future.”
Best Buy will be developing new home-based care solutions with Mass General Brigham.
But it also mentioned three existing solutions that will be leveraged: the aforementioned Current Health, which connects patients to nurses, paramedics, advanced practitioners and physicians in the home; services that “enable better home-based care coordination”; and Lively Mobile Plus, a personal emergency response system device that can help detect falls.
“America’s hospitals are crowded with patients often waiting hours, if not days, in hallways and emergency departments to receive their inpatient care,” Dorner said. “Mass General Brigham hospitals experience this burden on a daily basis. Home hospitalization provides a way to respond to the capacity crisis, improving access to care through a more patient-centered delivery model that is also lower cost than traditional care. Embracing all of those benefits, the expansion of Home Hospital is one of Mass General Brigham’s strategic priorities.”
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