After Best Buy sale, what's next for Current Health

This week, Best Buy's home health subsidiary Current Health revealed it was once again an independent company run by cofounder Chris McGhee, who left the company in 2024. McGhee told me he plans to focus Current on home hospital offerings and other high-acuity care opportunities, and to move the company toward profitability. Details of the deal were not specified and McGhee declined to discuss them.

Best Buy acquired Current Health for about $400 million in late 2021 at a time when many large companies far afield from health care were looking for ways to capitalize on the enthusiasm around health technology. Current's prospects looked very good as the number of hospital-at-home programs had grown significantly following a 2020 Medicare waiver that allowed hospitals to bill this care like an ordinary impatient visit.

Since then, Current has been a key piece of a struggling Best Buy Health division, which has recorded over $500 million in impairment charges this year. On a recent earnings call, CEO Corie Barry blamed, in part, slower than anticipated hospital-at-home adoption by health systems. The Medicare waiver has been extended but remains temporary which creates some uncertainty for potential customers and investors. Medically Home, another provider of these services, recently merged with DispatchHealth, reportedly at a loss in valuation.

On hospital at home: McGhee said Current operates about one-third of volume nationally, and it's the company's largest business. He said the adoption has been substantial but that the scale does not match the tremendous valuations raised by startups. Current will have two or three programs come online soon.

Yes, higher acuity care: McGhee is zeroed-in on the opportunity for the company to provide care around high-cost, high-need services. For example, the FDA requires that patients receiving CAR-T must be be closely monitored for dangerous conditions like cytokine release syndrome. Current Health can offer this monitoring in people's homes. McGhee said he will focus his team's efforts on oncology and a few other areas rather than pitching the market on an endless range of services that might be provided at home.

RPM, no thank you: Current Health helps some of its customers stand-up remote monitoring programs that use blood pressure cuffs, scales, and other devices to keep tabs on patients and potentially help them manage chronic conditions like diabetes. But he said he has avoided painting the company as an RPM vendor. He said he doesn't believe in the model that's been stood up around these services that encourages providers to bill as much as possible without necessarily driving clinical outcomes. He wonders how CMS will reign that in.

Will Current work in chronic disease management at all? "I want to grow a business that's actually driving positive change. And if we aren't convinced that we're actually adding any value, I'd rather we weren't playing in it," McGhee told me.

Why return? "I didn't come back here out of sentimentality, I came back because I think I can build a massive company and deliver value back into the system."

telehealth

Wellness startups capitalize on RFK's moves

Bodybuilders and longevity biohackers are used to coloring outside the lines of traditional medicine, experimenting with peptides, stem cells, and other alternative compounds in pursuit of "optimization." But as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promotes his vision to make America healthy again, including a call to make some of those experimental therapies more accessible to patients, they're gaining mainstream awareness — to the excitement of entrepreneurs.

As wellness companies follow a well-used pharma playbook to market their "personalized" drugs, telehealth is being used as a platform to scale up doctor-prescribed alternative therapies. "There's an element of trust that patients have in the white coat," said one endocrinologist who researches longevity. Is it being exploited?

policy

Mayo, Google execs on AI regs

Brittany Trang writes: At the Aspen Ideas Health Festival, health technology executives, who also happen to be former federal health IT officials, dished on the state of health AI governance:

Micky Tripathi, who was the top health IT regulator during the Biden administration, said on Tuesday that Mayo Clinic, where he is now chief AI implementation officer, has attempted to use some frameworks developed by the Coalition for Health AI and found that they are rigorous, but hard to implement, especially for providers with fewer resources.

Despite the fact that the deregulatory disposition of the current administration is meant to promote AI adoption, outgoing Google chief health officer (and Obama-era health IT regulator) Karen DeSalvo said there needs to be governmental guidance and standards in order for the field to thrive.

"The reality…is that I believe government is a convener of stature in this situation," she said. "No tech company, not really any academic organization, I think, has the stature to bring everyone to the table to start to say, 'Even if we don't know yet how we want to completely regulate, we should at least begin to all agree on the domains of assessment so that we can begin to move the field forward and do it in a way that there's some agreed-upon standards.'"

Industry news

Abridge's big raise, DeepMind's big model, and more

As long rumored, AI scribe company Abridge announced its $300 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz valuing the company at $5.3 billion. I wrote about the deal here and how the commoditization of ambient scribing features is driving Abridge and other companies to expand their offerings to get an edge.
In a preprint and blog post published on Wednesday, Google subsidiary DeepMind announced AlphaGenome, a new model for predicting how DNA encodes gene regulation. Read more from STAT's Katie Palmer
By now, you've probably heard that at a House budget hearing on Tuesday, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touted the value of wearables to help people live healthier, noted an upcoming HHS advertising campaign to promote the technology, and expressed a goal to have all Americans using a wearable within four years. Reminder that Kennedy is close with Surgeon General nominee Casey Means, who cofounded Levels, a metabolic health company that makes use of continuous glucose monitors. The Financial Times reported ties from CGM maker DexCom's lobbyist to the Trump administration.
In a digital health hearing before the House Ways & Means Committee, leaders from wearable maker Whoop, remote patient monitoring company CoachCare, and electronic medical record vendor Epic Systems answered questions from lawmakers. The most interesting tidbit came from Epic's Jackie Gerhart, in response to a question about why it remains so difficult to get records from one of your providers to another: "Health systems used Epic to exchange more than 700 million patient records to inform treatment in this last month alone, half of those exchanges were with organizations not using Epic EHRs." There you have it! Interoperability has been solved.
Sutter Health has a new deal with clinical AI company Aidoc "to provide Sutter patients with earlier identification of critical findings, faster intervention and better connected care."
Mandolin, which is working on tech to automate administrative tasks required for access to cancer and Alzheimer's drugs raised $40 million from Greylock Partners, SignalFire, Maverick, SV Angel, and others.
Certify, a provider data company, raised a $40 million Series B round led by Transformation Capital and investment from General Catalyst, Upfront Ventures, and SemperVirens.

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