Best Buy is best known for installing TVs and residential theater systems. Now, its Geek Squad helps to establish virtual hospital rooms.
The patron electronics retailer said Tuesday it has struck a three-year cope with Atrium Health, a North Carolina-based health-care system, to assist enable a hospital-at-home program. Atrium Health is an element of Advocate Health, considered one of the country’s largest health-care nonprofits.
Best Buy’s Geek Squad will go to patients’ homes, arrange technology that remotely monitors their heart rate, blood oxygen level or other vitals and train the patient or others in the house learn how to use the devices. The information would then be shared securely with doctors and nurses through the telemedicine hub from Current Health.
Best Buy began establishing virtual-care systems in mid-February for 10 hospitals in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. The corporate said it goals to have about 100 patients in this system every day — roughly similar to a midsized hospital but with no constructing.
Best Buy and Atrium didn’t disclose specific financial terms, but said Atrium will buy the devices from Best Buy and use Geek Squad services for installation and retrieval when the patient is cleared from care. Patients pays Atrium through their insurance, including Medicare or Medicaid.
Best Buy Health’s President Deborah Di Sanzo said with the Geek Squad doing the setup, it leaves the doctors and nurses free to give attention to the health of patients.
“This smooths out that connection between technology and care,” she said.
For Best Buy, the hospital-at-home program represents the newest push to show health care right into a more meaningful revenue driver. Its health-care expansion comes as sales of other consumer electronics slow.
Best Buy, like retailers including Walmart and Goal, has seen consumers buy fewer big-ticket and discretionary items as they pay more for food and housing. Many consumers also bought or upgraded their laptops, smartphones, kitchen appliances and other similar products throughout the early years of the pandemic.
The retailer expects a same-store sales decline of between 3% and 6% within the fiscal yr, with most of that drop coming in the primary six months.
Over the past five years, Best Buy has acquired three health-care firms: GreatCall, which makes easy-to-use cell phones and connected health devices and provides emergency response services for aging adults; Critical Signal Technologies, one other senior-focused company; and Current Health, a tech concern based in the UK that helps with distant patient monitoring and telehealth. Best Buy also sells health and wellness devices, including hearing aids and fitness trackers.
On an earnings call last week, CEO Corie Barry said Best Buy expects sales in its health division to grow faster than the remaining of its business this fiscal yr.
Di Sanzo, nevertheless, noted the at-home-care side of Best Buy’s health business is “still very nascent” and the revenue from it’s “still very small.”
“We would like to do that thoughtfully,” she said. “We would like to do that well. We would like to create pathways that enable care at home in a more seamless manner. We would like to tie technology and empathy together and really help change how health care is delivered to people of their homes.”
Atrium Health began its hospital-at-home program out of necessity early within the pandemic, when patients sick with Covid crowded its hospitals and filled its intensive care units, said Dr. Rasu Shrestha, chief innovation and commercialization officer at Atrium.
He said the health-care system saw this system had lasting advantages and will work for patients with other forms of conditions, resembling people recovering from a heart condition, an infection or surgery. It costs lower than hospital care and allows patients to get better while surrounded by family members and the comforts of home, he said.
Patients in this system are medically stable, Shrestha said. Some are discharged from the hospital or go straight into the hospital-at-home program after visiting the emergency room.
To this point, Atrium Health has served over 6,300 patients through the hospital-at-home program, he said.
