At-home care advocates are often quick to point out that the care modality improves the patient experience and allows hospitals to better manage capacity so they can ensure beds are available for the sickest patients. This is all true, but Current Health CEO Chris McGhee is drawing attention to a different benefit of at-home care models.

Many healthcare workers prefer providing at-home care because it allows them to provide more personal, less hectic care than they can on the hospital floor, he declared during an interview Tuesday at ViVE, a digital health innovation conference in Nashville. McGhee said that his company didn’t expect to hear so much of this sentiment from nurses and other clinicians, but knowing that they feel this way is crucial because switching more healthcare workers to at-home care could help alleviate the burnout crisis.

Current Health is an at-home care platform that was acquired by Best Buy in 2021 for $400 million. The Boston-based company is focused on helping healthcare providers deliver at-home care to “really any population,” including patients enrolled in hospital-at-home, chronic disease management or at-home oncology care programs, McGhee explained.

Many of the patients served by Current Health have unstable Internet access, don’t own a smartphone or don’t speak proficient English — that is why having Best Buy as a parent company has been so important, McGhee pointed out. Current Health utilizes Best Buy’s Geek Squad, its 24-hour emergency and on-site tech support service, to help patients smoothly transition to at-home care models.

“Trying to scale at-home service as a startup is really, really hard. But Best Buy is already in every local community — I mean, Geek Squad is 100,000 people. We use Geek Squad and the Best Buy network and supply chain to achieve this scale for health systems. For me, bringing Geek Squad into care-at-home as an enabler was a superpower that I didn’t ever think we could do,” McGhee said.

Having Geek Squad as an asset allows the health systems with which Current Health partners — including Geisinger, Mount Sinai, Atrium Health and NYU Langone — to alleviate the digital divide that may be present among the patients they care for at home. This is paramount as health systems across the country work to shift care models away from bricks-and-mortar locations, McGhee explained.

And care has certainly been moving away from brick-and-mortar facilities in recent years. McGhee said that the hospitals with which Current Health works understand that at-home care is a strategic area they should be prioritizing. 

“A health system CIO said to me the other day ‘We need to see ourselves no longer as just a set of buildings, but as a deliverer of healthcare within our community. And that means not just in hospitals, but in the patient’s home,’” McGhee declared.

He also recalled a conversation he had with a nurse who delivers at-home care through a health system partnership with Current Health. He said that she was ready to abandon the healthcare industry entirely after her experiences working in a hospital during the pandemic. But after she took a chance and agreed to deliver at-home care, she told him that she “had been wanting to deliver this kind of care” her whole career but never got the chance to while working in a hospital.

“If you’re on a floor in the hospital, you may get 30 seconds with a patient, then you get paged away and you have a job list that’s two pages long. If you’re in hospital-at-home, you’re going in for an hour, and you’re spending an hour with that patient in their own home — seeing how they live, spending time with them and their caregivers, and really getting to understand them and deliver care in a much more personal and holistic way than you can inside the hospital,” McGhee explained.

He said that many nurses share this sentiment and have found it much easier to engage with patients after switching to at-home care. Nurses have also found that they can assess patients’ social determinants of health in a much clearer way when they visit them in their homes, McGhee pointed out. 

Because of this, the work nurses do under at-home care models feels a lot more aligned with the reason they decided to join the healthcare sector in the first place — to help people and feel like they’re making a difference.

“I think at-home care is a really good way to retain the labor that we have,” McGhee declared.

Photo: Kiwis, Getty Images