Two esteemed names in their respective industries, Best Buy Health and Mass General Brigham (MGB), announced today that they will be collaborating to expand healthcare at home services. Using a technology driven care model, the initiative aims to address increasing patient demand for more convenient access to care while alleviating growing workforce shortages and improving health outcomes.
One of the key drivers for the collaboration is to help expand MGB’s Home Hospital service, an already established acute care model that enables patients with serious conditions such as COPD and heart disease to receive short-term, in-patient level care at home. Specifically, the program offers daily in-person and virtual visits, 24/7 access via phone and video, remote monitoring services, and even diagnostic testing capabilities. This is in addition to MGB’s Home Care service, which is more focused on providing longer-term care to those with chronic conditions.
Now, Best Buy Health will support both of these programs to further their capabilities, reach, and impact. Specifically, the collaboration will leverage Best Buy’s home care platform, Current Health, which is the company’s offering to streamline remote patient monitoring, enable telehealth services, and provide care teams with data driven dashboards to improve patient care. Current Health also provides significant logistics management and training services; in conjunction with Best Buy’s famous “Geek Squad” services, patients can work with Current Health to modify their home environments to optimize care delivery and also get training on healthcare equipment.
Additionally, MGB will also be using Lively, Best Buy Health’s personal emergency response system (PERS) device. The Lively device can help patients solicit help in case of a medical emergency, send alerts to friends and family, and help detect falls.
The timing for this collaboration is apt, as the healthcare at home landscape is rapidly gaining traction. In fact, this trend has been growing for nearly a decade, as patients increasingly value convenience above all else. This factor was further promulgated during the Covid-19 pandemic; amidst strict social distancing rules and widespread fear of hospital-based infections, patients increasingly demanded new ways to receive care in the comfort of their homes, perpetuating a virtual health and remote care delivery boom. Additionally, for providers and the system as a whole, healthcare at home may enable significant cost savings and more judicious use of healthcare services. A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine illustrated that the “adjusted mean cost of the acute care episode was 38% lower for home patients than control patients. Compared with usual care patients, home patients had fewer laboratory orders, imaging studies and consultations.” Overall, the study concluded that “substitutive home hospitalization reduced cost, health care use, and readmissions while increasing physical activity compared with usual hospital care.”
Notably, the healthcare at home concept has in large part become possible due to significant improvements in technology. Specifically, the rise of virtual care modalities and remote monitoring tools and devices has enabled more curated care delivery. Research indicates that these new technologies can indeed positively impact patient outcomes: a study published in JAMA Cardiology, which looked at remote blood pressure and cholesterol monitoring, illustrated an association between remote monitoring services and improvement in chronic disease quality metrics.
Heather O’Sullivan, President of Healthcare at Home at Mass General Brigham, explains that consumers are increasingly choosing healthcare at home as an alternative to facility-based care. She is largely optimistic about this idea and how it can be achieved with technology: “by enabling our world-class provider services with technology that matters, we are elevating system capabilities and, most importantly, improving clinical outcomes for the communities we serve today while preparing for the future delivery of care more broadly.”
Deborah Di Sanzo, President of Best Buy Health, is equally optimistic about care at home services, but cautions that “bringing care across that threshold [into homes] isn’t as easy as it sounds.”
Indeed, to her point, there is still a lot of work to be done in this arena. For one, the whole concept of providing a higher level of care at home is still relatively new when compared to legacy healthcare models; thus, there is a significant amount of work yet to be done in rolling these initiatives out in a smooth and seamless manner. Furthermore, scaling anything in healthcare is challenging, often due to costs, staffing shortages, and the numerous systemic barriers. Thus, meaningful adoption of this will take time. However, if done correctly and in a way that prioritizes patient safety and outcomes above all else, collaborations like this have significant potential to truly help improve healthcare delivery.
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