Best Buy Could Install the Hospital in Your Home. It Couldn't Get the Hospital to Pay.

A Geek Squad agent who normally mounts your TV walks into the home of a Geisinger patient with a chronic condition and sets up a remote monitoring kit. The before-and-after is striking: the same setup that used to take an average of 96 hours from referral to working device gets done in 48.⁶ Cut clean in half. It is exactly the kind of result that makes a strategy deck sing — the install muscle Best Buy spent thirty years building, redeployed to the bedside. The pilot worked. The business did not.

The official story is that Best Buy is pivoting from a struggling box-mover into a services-and-health company, with Geek Squad as the secret weapon. The truer story is shorter and more expensive: Best Buy spent over $1.3 billion buying its way into a market it did not understand, then wrote much of it off and sold a piece back to the man it bought it from.

The bet: that the last mile was the moat

The logic was seductive and, on paper, sound. Healthcare was migrating into the home. Somebody had to physically get the device through the door, plug it in, and make it work for an 80-year-old who has never paired anything by Bluetooth. Best Buy already had that somebody — Geek Squad, the install-and-repair force it had been running since the 1990s, long before it ever thought about healthcare. So it went shopping. In August 2018 it paid $800 million in cash for GreatCall, a connected-health provider with more than 900,000 paying subscribers and over $300 million in annual revenue.¹ A year later it added Critical Signal Technologies, a remote-monitoring firm, for $125 million.⁸ Then in fiscal 2022 it spent $389 million in net cash on Current Health, a care-at-home technology platform — a deal that generated $351 million of goodwill, all of it parked in the Best Buy Health reporting unit.²

Three acquisitions, over $1.3 billion, one coherent thesis: own the last mile of home health and you own a durable advantage no insurer or hospital can replicate. The thesis had a flaw that doesn't show up in a deck. The last mile was real. It just wasn't where the money lived.

Why installing the device isn't the same as getting paid for it

Here is the part the strategy missed. In consumer retail, the person who chooses the product is the person who pays for it — you walk in, you decide, you swipe. Best Buy is world-class at that game. But home health doesn't run on consumer choice. It runs on clinical reimbursement: a health system or a payer decides whether a remote-monitoring program is covered, at what rate, and for which patients, and that decision is the entire revenue engine. Best Buy could shrink setup time from 96 hours to 48 all day long, and it would not move the variable that mattered, because no payer reimburses faster on the basis of a tidier install.⁶ The competence Best Buy brought was genuine. It was simply downstream of the gate, and the gate was held by people who had never heard of the Pepsi Challenge of TV-mounting.

When a company is excellent at one thing and assumes that excellence will carry it into an adjacent market, it usually mistakes a feature for a foundation. Geek Squad was a feature of a healthcare business. The foundation — the reimbursement relationships, the clinical validation, the regulatory patience — Best Buy never owned, and could not buy at scale fast enough to matter.

The write-down that admitted it

The reckoning arrived in the filings, which are blunter than any press release. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, the quarter ending February 1, 2025, Best Buy recorded a pre-tax non-cash goodwill impairment of $475 million on the Best Buy Health reporting unit.³ The company's own annual report explained why in language that reads like a confession: the charge 'primarily arose from downward revisions of revenue growth rates and margin rates compared to projections used in prior years.'⁷ Translated: the business was never going to make the money the deal model promised. The following quarter brought $109 million in restructuring charges, largely asset impairments tied to the health unit, and a CEO admitting the at-home care business had 'been harder and taken longer to develop than we initially thought.'⁴

The clearest verdict came in June 2025, when Best Buy sold Current Health back to Christopher McGhee — the co-founder it had bought the company from — for a price it declined to disclose.⁵ When you return an asset to its originator and won't say what you got for it, the number is not the headline. The reversal is.

But wasn't the home-health thesis basically correct?

The fair objection is that the macro bet was right. Care really is moving into the home, the aging population really does need exactly the install-and-support layer Best Buy provides, and the Geisinger pilot really did work — 96 hours to 48, with a platform that grew past 1,100 enrolled patients.⁶ Maybe Best Buy was simply early. That's the strongest case, and it concedes the actual lesson. Being right about where the world is going is not the same as being positioned to profit from it. Best Buy bought the easiest layer of the value chain — the physical setup — precisely because it was the layer it already understood, and left the hard, value-defining layers (reimbursement, clinical evidence, payer trust) in other hands. An adjacency is only safe to enter when your existing strength addresses the part of the new market that actually controls the money. Here it addressed the part that didn't. The honest counter is that Best Buy kept the pieces that fit its old game — the Lively senior-support brand and emergency-response devices, which sell to consumers the way TVs do — and shed the enterprise clinical business that never would.⁵ That isn't a failed pivot so much as a corrected one. The correction just cost half a billion dollars to learn.

Best Buy could get the hospital into your home faster than anyone. It could not get the hospital to pay for the privilege — because the institution that signs the check was never standing at the front door where Geek Squad does its best work. The genius the company thought it owned was logistical, and logistics is a wonderful thing to be great at. It is just not, on its own, a place to stand in a market where someone else decides who gets reimbursed. Best Buy spent over $1.3 billion proving it, and got most of one acquisition's worth of cash back by handing the keys to the man it bought them from.