Best Buy Health Partners with Leading Hospital to Support In-Home Care

In collaboration with Boston’s Mass General Brigham hospital, Best Buy Health will support an expanded home-based health care delivery model designed to improve how safe, quality care can be provided with technology and clinical expertise. The partners’ first priority is to scale and support Mass General Brigham’s Home Hospital, which will expand access to Massachusetts residents choosing to receive acute-level hospital care in their homes.

Best Buy Health and Mass General Brigham will develop customized systems and capabilities to enhance the experience for Home Hospital patients, and the hospital also will leverage existing Best Buy Health technology and support services, including:

• Current Health, Best Buy’s care-at-home platform that connects patients to nurses, paramedics, advanced practitioners and physicals;
• Services enabling better coordination of how home-based care is delivered, along with logistics management to support the broader care team (earlier this year Best Buy also added the installation of in-home medical devices to the services offered through its Geek Squad); and
• Lively Mobile Plus, a personal emergency response system (PERS) device that can detect falls and enable patients to contact an Urgent Response Agent.

The partners also are seeking to address worker shortages in health care. While the Home Hospital experience already has generated increased employee satisfaction via innovative hybrid practice options and reduced clinician burnout, as part of this new relationship the two organizations will make significant investments in the health care worker community, creating equitable academic opportunities for people seeking careers in nursing, paramedics and digital technology.

Many retailers have made moves into the burgeoning “medtail” movement, including:

• GNC recently announced plans to expand its own virtual health care offering, GNC Health, after previously adding health care services into its GNC Pro membership program;
• CVS acquired Aetna in 2017 and has since rolled out a suite of health care services, including continued expansion of its HealthHub and MinuteClinic health and wellness centers;
• Walmart continues to add new Health Centers that provide a range of medical services including primary care, labs, X-ray and EKG, behavioral health and counseling, dental, optical and hearing. The first Walmart Health center opened in 2019; and
• Instacart’s new suite of “Food as Medicine” tools for health care providers.