After being part of Best Buy’s healthcare business for the past four years, virtual care platform Current Health is reclaiming its independence.
In a June 24 blog post, company co-founder Christopher McGhee announced plans to return as CEO of the newly autonomous company, which was founded in 2014 and helps health systems move patient care into home settings. Best Buy purchased the company for $400 million in 2021, though neither party disclosed the financial details of the recent divestment.
McGhee spoke with Healthcare Brew about his plans for Current Health as he takes the helm once again. He told us he wants to focus the company on treating acute and complex patient populations as opposed to long-term chronic condition management, as that’s where he believes it can “most move the needle on outcomes for the patient and cost.”
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What changes can we expect from Current Health now that you’re an independent company again?
I’m really trying to take us back to our scrappy startup roots. I want us to innovate and build out our product with urgency and deliver the absolute best frontline experience to our clinical users and to our patients. I want to see rapid innovation in what we do, in building our product, and expanding our product.
The four big priorities for me are:
- How do we continue to build out our health monitoring services and clinical team and what that team does?
- How do we use more AI and automation to allow these programs to cost-efficiently scale? The world is dramatically different today than the one it was when I sold the company in 2021. The AI technologies that are out have fundamentally changed the game for how some of these services can be done.
- How do we orchestrate all of the technology and all of the services that are going on in the home?
- Then the fourth one is the business model: How do we make sure that it’s aligned to the way our customer makes money?
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You have partnerships with more than 40 health systems, including big names like Mount Sinai and Mass General Brigham. What’s your strategy when it comes to deciding which systems to partner with?
We want to work with any organization that wants to deliver healthcare in a different way and wants to deliver more of that healthcare in a community or home setting. Some of the most innovative and forward-thinking healthcare organizations are really small, but they’re making dramatic changes to care in their local communities. That can have a pretty dramatic impact on local cost and outcome improvement. We certainly aren’t just looking to partner with the biggest.
In your post announcing your return as CEO, you mentioned you want to build Current into the “world’s largest healthcare organization.” What are your biggest challenges to meeting that goal?
Honestly, just the status quo. When we started Current Health, there wasn’t necessarily a ton of acute and complex care in the home. Hospital-at-home existed, but it didn’t really exist at any scale. Fast-forward nine years, and it’s a seismic shift in the way healthcare is delivered in this country. Now all of the sudden, people are culturally and psychologically ready to deliver more care in the home than they were five, 10 years ago.
But I think the biggest challenge still remains the cultural change around moving from a world that’s very centric around large brick-and-mortar facilities to one where healthcare is delivered in the community and the patient’s own home. How do we get more solid payment models like the waiver, which allows hospital-at-home to be done? It’s a temporary waiver that needs to be extended by Congress.