Why don’t you consider a role as a healthcare provider?
When you’re formulating a strategy, especially if you’re building a health strategy at a non-medical company, I always think the first place you look is the core competencies of the company you’re building. developing that strategy. we’ve covered Best Buy’s core competencies. During the pandemic, doctors are taking remote patient monitoring devices out of their packaging, inserting batteries, and putting them in new packaging. They’re training patients how to use it, and they’re even providing tech support when something doesn’t work at home. Doctors don’t have time for this. Nurses don’t have time for this.
We thought, “This is a demand that perfectly matches Best Buy’s capabilities. This is what we will rely on now.
We purchased Existing Health for a HIPAA compliant platform that connects devices in the home and then connects to an electronic health record. We don’t have to be doctors. There are many doctors in the world. Best Buy is not a healthcare organization, but we are a great technical organization and that’s what we’re going to bring.
You have acquired many companies as part of your healthcare strategy. What is your stance on mergers and acquisitions now?
We want to look at anything that allows for home care. I can imagine there are other companies that could join our portfolio and support care. It can be in the form of a joint venture or an association. It could be an acquisition.
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What is the status of your partnership with health systems through Health currently?
The current health has exceeded our expectations. When reviewing a home care platform, we screened 300 companies. We chose Current Wellness for our excellent management team and—no pun intended—the current platform. When we acquired Current Health, they partnered with 9 hospital systems in the US and 11 in the UK. We currently work with 32 of the UK health trusts and we work with 22 health systems in the US We work with 5 of the top 20 health systems in the US United What we found was that our value proposition as chief of home care technology resonated with leading health systems in the United States, so we began to enhance our capabilities. and put the platform to work and connect patients with their caregivers much faster than we anticipated.
What’s next for Best Buy Health?
We will always be recruiting developers. There are probably never too many developers that we can have, because there’s so much we can do to enhance our ability to care at home.
We started using Geek Squad and Geek Squad City for support and logistics about 18 months ago. We first started a commercial home-based elderly business, delivering commercial and personal emergency response equipment to individuals’ homes. We then begin with a pilot that enables in-home care with Geek Squad agents, bringing the device to a patient’s home or just assisting patients from our Geek Squad City areas. The pilot was successful. We will be extending support from Geek Squad to hospitals enabling home care.
We believe that people love to heal at home. They are there with their family around, maybe their pets. It’s a familiar place. We want to be able to extend this to more health systems and more payers, and that’s where we’re going.
