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best buy is one of many retail giants which has made its way into health care, with its health division dubbed Best Health Buy focusing on the union of home-based elderly care and technology-enabled human interaction.
Diana Gelston, Chief Commercial Officer of Best Buy Health, spoke with MobiHealthNews to discuss Best Buy’s role in the healthcare ecosystem and what it looks for in a partner.
MNH: How is Best Buy Health different from other major retailers getting into healthcare?
Diana Gelston: When we look at things, we want to look at anything that really enables home care. We really focus on three areas: the home wellness area, then aging in place, and finally home care. And so anything that can really enable that home care, and I’m sure there are other companies that come into the home care portfolio, maybe it’s a joint venture or ‘partnership. It might be an acquisition in the future, but it’s really about enabling that home care. We don’t want to be the caregiver per se like other retailers are.
And I think that’s what makes Best Buy different. We facilitate the connection between, for example, doctor and patient. We enable connections between a care manager at a payer and a senior. And then we empower caregivers.
Very different from other models on the market. Other models want to do home care or want to deliver the pharmacy to their homes. That’s not what we do.
MNH: Best Buy Health has partnered with the Charlotte, NC-based healthcare system Atrium Health and acquired a home care and remote patient monitoring platform Current health. How have these collaborations helped expand the company’s offerings?
Gelston: With respect to the acquisition of Current Health, we’ve certainly seen in the pandemic that everybody’s been scrambling to set up telehealth practices or trying to make those patient-doctor connections in their homes, and keep people at home, instead of adding more people to the system.
So with the acquisition of Current Health, we really recognized that we needed in-home remote patient monitoring equipment. And how do you get the remote home patient monitoring equipment? How do you connect it? How to make sure the batteries are working?
How to ensure that the caregiver and the patient know how to use it? How do you ensure that this connection between the doctor actually works? And what we’re doing is we’re really curating these remote patient monitoring and consumer health devices. So we have layers of support with Current Health’s enterprise platform that really connects both devices and technology, that connection between the patient and their provider.
And then we have layers of support including Team of geekswho crosses the threshold of someone’s house to help train people, set up surveillance equipment, make sure it’s working, make sure the Wi-Fi is working, and sometimes a member of the Geek Squad, not because they’re hungry, but they’ll open the fridge and they’ll make sure that person has food and is taken care of as well.
So all those little things that happen when you cross the last mile and cross the threshold to help support technology and those connections between doctors and their patients.
MNH: What is Best Buy Health looking to do next? Are they looking to break into new areas of home health care?
Gelston: I think the challenges people face are getting the logistics right and making sure we’ve done that because we started using Geek Squad about 18 months ago to support surveillance at patient distance, as well as the Current Health platform and devices. And so we started using them, we started using Geek Squad City for logistics. And we have plenty of places to go.
And we just want to continue to really expand that to more health care systems and more payers, and so that’s really where we’re going to be heading.
MNH: So you’re going to see what payers and healthcare systems really want to deliver?
Gelston: I think as payers, and as a health care system, and as consumers of senior health and life care, and also just regular consumers, are looking to enable that home care or to enable that home wellness, making sure we have all the resources, all the capabilities, all the care support, proactively in terms of wellness, as well as reactively in terms of a program of care. home, and along that continuum, ensuring that we can sustain that infrastructure over time.
MNH: How do mergers and acquisitions and the establishment of partnerships play a role in this?
Gelston: So I think as we think about expanding our footprint, as we think about expanding our partnerships with health systems in particular, we look to those who are at the forefront, but also who need help to expand their reach of care into areas that can be challenging.
And we want to make sure that there is health equity in everything we offer, that the entire population we can serve is supported by our solutions and the enabling solutions we deliver.
MNH: What type of digital health companies, in particular, stand out or make an impression on Best Buy Health?
Gelston: Oh, there are many digital health companies that impress us every day. The market changes every moment. I think those who bring a path that can complement what we do and our ability to collaborate together will always be of interest to us.
MNH: So, look at what Best Buy Health already has to offer and see how they could help expand what it does.
Gelston: Yes, through partnerships. We’re already talking and bringing a lot of different technologies to the table, not just our own. We partner with many people and being part of a larger retail organization allows us to look at a ton of different technologies through the lens of a retailer. So I think that’s also what makes us unique.
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