Best Buy’s Landmark Partnership With Geisinger Signifies Its Growing Healthcare Ambitions

One of the oldest electronic retail companies, Best Buy, is partnering with one of the country’s largest healthcare systems, Geisinger, on a healthcare venture aimed at improving care at home for patients with chronic disease. Earlier this week, Best Buy Health formally announced that it would be working with the hospital organization to “bring a better level of care to more patients within the Geisinger network.”

In early 2021, Geisinger launched its ConnectedCare365 chronic care management platform, which was designed to help patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart failure use digital and remote patient monitoring tools to keep track of their metrics and hopefully achieve better outcomes by doing so. The organization has since enrolled more than 1,100 patients in this program, who, through Best Buy Health’s care-at-home platform, Current Health, can correspond this data back to their Geisinger care teams. I wrote in 2021 about how Best Buy purchased Current Health for nearly $400 million, indicating its significant interest in the healthcare industry and continued push to expand its service ecosystem. Since then, Best Buy has made significant strides in the world of care delivery.

One of Best Buy’s signature offerings is its Geek Squad, a technology support service which the company has offered for many years to its consumers. The company is collaborating with Geisinger to deploy Geek Squad Agents to help patients install and work with remote care management devices at home, in addition to educating them on the tools and ensuring that information is being sent back to the appropriate care teams. This is a huge boon to many patients, as the remote monitoring device ecosystem is rapidly expanding; new devices are coming to market frequently and may often entail cumbersome setup processes and steep learning curves.

Indeed, the concepts of remote monitoring devices and healthcare-at-home more generally have seen incredible growth in the last decade. Studies indicate that the remote patient monitoring system market is expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 18.9% over the next 5 years, boasting immense demand. The healthcare-at-home model has also gained significant traction as technological improvements have enabled virtual care services and asynchronous care management, in addition to patients simply solving for convenience. Especially after the Covid-19 pandemic when many things became virtual, patients have started to place a higher premium on being able to access healthcare services in the comfort of their own homes. Technologies such as telehealth, at-home diagnostic test kits, remote monitoring devices, and more elaborate healthcare-at-home programs have empowered this desire.

In the case of Best Buy and Geisinger, the organizations note that their partnership has had tremendous results: “50% reduction in the time from admission into the chronic care-at-home program to when device set up is completed and the Geisinger care team can begin monitoring the patient remotely…19% improvement in how well patients follow their care plans by wearing and using their remote technology equipment more consistently…[and] 18% reduction in technical issues reported.”

The President of Best Buy Health, Deborah Di Sanzo, explains in the press release: “The results of our program show that when we combine what Best Buy is known for—technology support and expertise—with Geisinger’s best-in-class care teams and network of clinics and hospitals, we can make a meaningful difference in the patient and caregiver experience…Geisinger has been incredible in this work and we’re very excited about our ability to scale these capabilities across the country to further Best Buy Health’s goal to enable care at home for everyone.”

Indeed, Geisinger itself is going through a period of immense growth. Earlier this year, one of the largest healthcare organizations in the world, Kaiser Permanente, announced that it would be acquiring the Geisinger system to help promote better outcomes, increase access to affordable care, and focus on providing more value to communities. Geisinger is already one of the most prominent health systems in its region, serving nearly 3+ million patients across 45 counties. Dr. Jaewon Ryu, M.D., J.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Geisinger and who was appointed as the new leader of the partnership between Geisinger and Kaiser, explained that the partnership and working together will enable the organizations to “reach new heights in healthcare.”

Congruently, Karen Murphy, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation & Digital Transformation Officer of Geisinger, explains that this partnership with Best Buy has helped “redefine the care experience” and will enable positive change in the way that care is delivered.

Indeed, Best Buy and Geisinger— two organizations which have had incredible success in their own respective realms— collaborating in an effort to improve healthcare, is certainly a promising step forward. With relentless innovation and a continued commitment to enhancing patient care, this partnership has immense potential to truly improve healthcare for millions of people.