On Tuesday, the retail giant Best Buy announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire the home care and remote monitoring platform Current Health in an effort “to help make home the center of health,” according to the company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Like other major retail companies, such as Amazon and Walmart, Richfield, Minnesota-based Best Buy has been steadily increasing its interest in both health care and home care over the last few years. In 2018, Best Buy acquired GreatCall, a health technology company that designs phones for older adults, for $800 million. Less than a year later, in 2019, Best Buy acquired Critical Signal Technologies, a provider of remote patient monitoring services for seniors. Unlike Amazon and Walmart, however, Best Buy’s recent acquisitions indicate that it is uniquely focused on the older adult population.
Current Health is a leading care-at-home technology platform based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded in 2015 by its current CEO, Christopher McCann, its platform enables healthcare organizations to deliver high-quality, patient-centric care at a lower cost. The company’s platform combines remote patient monitoring, telehealth and patient engagement all into a single solution for healthcare organizations. By utilizing biosensor technology and patient-reported data, Current Health can generate actionable, real-time insights into the patient’s condition. Since the start of 2020, Current Health’s revenue has grown over 3,000%, and its customer base has increased 400%.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Mr. McCann wrote about how Current Health and Best Buy share “a similar vision for the future of health care as well as a common understanding of the challenges of making the home a primary site of care,” making them good partners in the healthcare space.
