When Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) purchased Current Health in 2021, it signaled a significant expansion of retail presence in the home-based care space.
Fast forward, four years later, and the business is back under the helm of its co-founder and former CEO, Christopher McGhee.
Current Health’s platform includes remote patient monitoring, telehealth, a full support model and patient engagement tools. The company partners with health care providers across the country to enable them to deliver at-home care, including hospital-at-home.
Having purchased his business back, McGhee is focused on Current Health’s next chapter, which includes a focus on more complex care, growth and building a sustainable business. He recently discussed the Best Buy divestiture, the untapped opportunities in the at-home care space and the uncertain hospital-at-home waiver in a conversation with Home Health Care News.
The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
HHCN: Can you walk me through the backstory of the deal? When did talks to buy back the company begin, and then how did we get here?
McGhee: The conversation started over the last two or three months.
I left Best Buy in March of 2024. I remained excited about the home and community-based health care space. When the conversation cropped up about reacquiring Current Health, I felt like the company still had the best clients on the market, the best product on the market, the best team on the market, so it represented a really good foundation to continue growing and building in this space.
What changes can we expect now that Current Health is an independent company again, and no longer part of Best Buy?
The mission of the companies is still exactly the same. Our focus is, how do we shift as much appropriate health care as possible out of institutional settings like the hospital and into home and community-based settings.
More tactically, over the next 12 to 18 months, we’re going to focus on the more complex, high-risk and acute populations. That includes things like hospital-at-home, but also some of the work that we’ve been doing in oncology, where there is the potential to deliver those services outpatient, or even in the patient’s own home.
We’re also super focused on being the absolute best product in the world. When I say product, I mean software, hardware, logistics, operations, clinical — I don’t just mean technology. That means working with our partners right at the frontlines, with frontline nurses, frontline doctors, understanding what we can do better, and really getting back to our innovation routes and building out the best product in the world for those complex acute patients with our clinical partners.
You mentioned the company would return to a scrappiness, startup spirit.
When I talk about that scrappiness, a big part of that is how we can make sure that the people on our team who are building this product are in absolute lockstep with the frontline users and build with urgency to deliver them the absolute best product.
The other thing is listening to our market, listening to our customers, in areas where we can help them increase the scale, increase the number of patients who can successfully, safely get access to high-quality care in the home, whether it’s within a hospital-at-home program or an oncology at-home program.
While there’s been tremendous growth in this space, it’s still an immature space, and there’s lots of mutual learning that can go on between us, our clinical partners, in order to define what really is the best-in-class template for oncology at home or hospital-at-home. We’re all learning together and then bringing that out to the rest of the market.
What are your strategic priorities going forward?
I have two priorities. One is building a sustainable, profitable company, and the second one is focusing on those complex, acute, high-risk populations where we have traditionally been really strong. Today, a third of the U.S. hospital-at-home volume flows through Current Health, and we’re already a strong player there. I want us to do more. We’re already a strong player in the oncology space. I want us to do more.
What are some of the biggest untapped opportunities that you see in the at-home care space?
Over the last few years, we have seen drugs come out that either cure different types of cancers or turn them into chronic diseases that people can live with. These drugs are also expensive, and they create new support requirements for patients that hospitals and doctors haven’t necessarily had to deal with before. One of our partners, Sarah Cannon, has published really good data with us showing that these types of drugs can be safely delivered in the outpatient and home environment. I think the opportunity there is absolutely tremendous, and it’s one of the reasons why we’re really focused on this complex, acute space.
What are some of the biggest challenges you foresee? How will Current Health navigate these challenges?
I think the first one is just regulatory certainty. If we look at the hospital-at-home model, its growth has been predicated on the Acute Hospital Care at Home waiver that’s being extended time and time again. That waiver needs to be made permanent. We hope that Congress will act to do that.
This is also a cultural shift for many institutions. If I think back to like, 2018, 2019, many of these concepts were fairly new in the space. That cultural shift has been quite remarkable to see over the last four or five years, as our health system partners deliver health care throughout the entire community, not just within their hospitals. I think the technology and services improvements from companies like my own are also important. We can look at where there are logistical, operational or technical reasons why certain patient groups can’t be addressed. Our job is to make it as easy as possible for our clinical partners to move these patients home and safely deliver really high-quality care to them.