Best Buy’s new healthcare unit is all about bringing the hospital home

Best Buy might be the first place you think of if you’re buying a new laptop or a fancy flat-screen TV, but executives at the retail giant want customers to think of another service: healthcare.

Deborah Di Sanzo, president of Best Buy Health, laid out Best Buy’s healthcare strategy during an April 19 keynote at the HIMSS 2023 Global Health Conference and Exhibition, which she said focuses on bringing healthcare into patients’ homes.

“We don’t deliver care, we take care of the technology so the clinicians can deliver care and the patients can feel comfortable getting care in their own home,” Di Sanzo said.

Best Buy has trained members of its famous Geek Squad in medical device technology, and plans to send them into patients’ homes to deliver the tech they need, like a heart monitor, for their virtual appointment, and help the patient or their family set it up. The patient would then use Best Buy’s Current Health platform—which it acquired for $400 million in 2021—to connect with their provider.

Through Current Health, Best Buy has partnerships with five of the 10 largest health systems in the US, including Mount Sinai Health System and NYU Langone Health, both in New York City. Di Sanzo said the company is looking to partner with more hospitals across the country.

The concept of “hospital-at-home” has been a hot trend in healthcare for a number of years.

Johns Hopkins Medicine has run a hospital-at-home program since 1994, and a 2022 survey conducted by consulting firm McKinsey estimated that $265 billion in care services for Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage beneficiaries—or 25% of the total cost of care—could move into the home setting by 2025.

But the US, unlike countries that have single-payer healthcare, has been slow to adopt successful hospital-at-home programs, largely due to doctors’ concerns about quality of care, insurance coverage, and malpractice liability.

VillageMD CEO Tim Barry, who also spoke at the keynote session, cautioned that the technology needed for hospital-at-home programs is still in the “third pitch, first inning.”

Di Sanzo agreed that “one of the challenges that we face…is having technology not get in the way of patient care, and having technology support the efficiency of practice…It works sometimes, but it doesn’t work consistently all the time.”

But ultimately, it’s “not about the tech,” she said. “It’s about the care. How can you make the technology disappear so that really what is front and center is the primary care physician...and the patient really getting well?”