Best Buy spent nearly $400 million to acquire care-at-home tech company Current Health in 2021, but the retailer faced challenges scaling the business.
The consumer electronic giant divested the company as co-founder Christopher McGhee reacquired it, according to a Current Health blog post last week.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
McGhee is returning as CEO to run Current Health as an independent business with a goal to build the company into the "world’s largest healthcare organization," he wrote in the blog post. A number of former members of McGhee's team, including co-founder Stewart Whiting, are also returning.
McGhee said he's "super bullish and aggressive" about Current Health's growth prospects. "I think this can be a tremendously significant company, and I want to keep working with our amazing health systems across the U.S.," he said, while also noting he wants to continue to grow Current Health's partnerships with health systems.
"The future of healthcare is in the home and the community, and we have a role to play in that transformation," he said.
Launched in 2014, Current Health is a technology and services company to support healthcare organizations' care-at-home programs, specifically hospital-at-home and oncology-at-home—including cell and gene therapies. The company's platform combines a proprietary FDA-cleared monitoring device, a suite of third-party devices, integrated telehealth, patient engagement tools and electronic health record integrations.
McGhee said he was motivated to start Current Health based on his own grandmother's experience with the healthcare system. "She was like so many patients in today’s healthcare system: she had COPD, dementia and heart failure. She was registered blind and had poor mobility. She was recurrently admitted to hospital in her final years for things that could and should have been managed at home," he wrote in the blog post.
In the past 10 years, hospital-at-home programs have grown rapidly. More than one-third of all patients in the U.S. who have had a hospital-at-home experience have been cared for through the Current Health platform, McGhee said.
Current Health has supported home healthcare programs that have served 70,000 patients, according to the company.
The healthcare industry is in early innings of the shift from hospital-based care to home- and community-based care, McGhee said, and he sees Current Health playing a large role in that movement.
There are significant opportunities to move complex, high-cost care out of the hospital and into home-based or community-based settings to better serve high-risk patients, he noted. "I spent a lot of time looking at use cases in oncology, specifically around cell and gene therapies and other very high-cost specialty drugs that have historically been delivered inpatient. When the conversation sprung up about reacquiring Current Health, I felt that it was a really good foundation to continue solving some of those problems," he told Fierce Healthcare.
"Current Health, in my humble opinion, has the best customer group in that space, has a really good team and has a really good product. I felt like there was unfinished business. I think there's tremendous potential in this space if we focus on the right areas," he noted.
The company is working with 40 health systems and also partners with pharmaceutical companies on decentralized clinical trials and commercial deployment. Current Health is working with Mass General Brigham, Atrium Health and Geisinger Health, among others, to scale up healthcare-at-home programs.
In the past four years since acquiring Current Health, Best Buy has struggled to make the its healthcare division profitable.
In the fourth quarter of 2024, Best Buy recorded a pretax noncash goodwill impairment charge of $475 million related to its Best Buy Health reporting unit. The impairment charge reflects downward revisions in the long-term financial projections for Best Buy Health, the company said.
“We still believe in the fundamental strategy of leveraging technology to enable care at home and believe it will be important to the future of healthcare, but the market is not scaling as fast as we originally forecasted,” Corie Barry, Best Buy CEO, told investors during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.
Current Health already does a sizable amount of work in the oncology space, and McGhee wants the company to double down on this business.
“I think that one of the weaknesses in the home-based care space as a whole has been companies not being focused enough on where there is a durable, viable payment model to actually deliver that care into a home-based or another community-based environment. It could be an ambulatory infusion center. There are other lower-cost, more appropriate environments that can deliver as good or better care at lower cost,” he said.
“We want to be absolutely laser-focused on where is there complex, high-cost, high-risk populations, where there's a very clear payment model, and where there's very clear benefit to the patient, and it being done in a lower-cost environment. I think hospital-at-home is one of those. I think oncology around cell and gene therapies is one of those. Those other areas where new, very high-cost drugs and devices are coming out that could be delivered in a different environment,” he noted. “Where we're less interested in focusing is some of these lower-cost, higher-volume models, where the clinical benefit is maybe a little bit less clear, where the payment model is a little bit less clear.”
McGhee views Current Health as diverging from remote patient monitoring companies that focus on chronic disease management.
Current Health provides technology and devices to patients along with clinical dashboards for care teams and services through a clinical command center and clinical research.
“One of my greatest learnings is that I don't think pure technology plays work in healthcare. A services component is essential to allow these systems and new technologies to actually be used. Wraparound services are essential,” McGhee said. “We were already providing logistics. We were already providing 24/7 clinical nursing care through our command center. We were already doing compliance and adherence management for patients in our programs. Those have grown a lot over the last few years, and we intend to keep doing it. We provide that technological window into the home, if you like, to understand the patient's health, but we also provide all of the services to actually make any of that happen.”
Hospital-at-home programs got a big boost in 2020 when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the Acute Hospital Care at Home Waiver during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CMS allowed certain Medicare-certified hospitals to treat patients with inpatient-level care at home using Section 1135 waivers of the Social Security Act. The CMS waived specific hospital conditions of participation that require 24-hour on-site nursing for patients.
The program has been extended multiple times, most recently through Sept. 30, 2025, but most health systems and advocates of hospital-at-home services are pushing for lawmakers for a longer, five-year extension.
As of June 27, 400 hospitals across 142 systems in 30 states have been approved to participate in the Acute Hospital Care at Home program. Before the waiver, 20 of these programs existed across the U.S.
During Best Buy’s first-quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings call in late May, Barry acknowledged that uncertainty about the CMS waivers have been a hindrance to scaling that business.
“The part that has been harder and taken longer to develop than we initially thought is some of the very discrete in-home health that we are providing in partnership with some of the healthcare industry. And that's really been made more complex twofold, one, by the adoption of hospital at home solutions at scale just being slower because partially, the health at home waiver has been caught up in a lot of the administration's budgeting conversations, and it's been inconsistent in terms of how long that waiver will be in place. And two, some of the healthcare providers have just faced their own financial struggles over the past few years.”
"Care-at-home programs are growing despite the regulatory uncertainty," McGhee said. "I think a lot of health systems have now got commercial arrangements that allow them to grow regardless of what Medicare does or doesn't do. I don't think the genie can go back into the bottle,” he said, noting that hospital-at-home programs have demonstrated strong financial and clinical outcomes.
“I think it will take time for the waiver to be made permanent. I think that will happen eventually. We certainly don't see ourselves as a hospital-at-home company. We see ourselves as focused on those complex, high-cost, high-risk populations, and sure, hospital-at-home is one example of them, but we can grow regardless of what happens with the waiver,” he said.