Health Services, Health Tech

Best Buy acquires senior remote monitoring company Critical Signal Technologies

Best Buy's acquisition of CST builds on the company's $800 million purchase of Great Call last year, which served to steer the company's business in a strategic direction towards providing technology products, services and solutions to the aging population.

Office workstation top view of business people working around M&A, keyboard, calculator, phablet and money on wooden table - merger and acquisition concept

As part of its continuing effort to grow its at-home health services business, electronics retailer Best Buy acquired remote monitoring company Critical Signal Technologies last month.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Critical Signals Technologies is a Novi, Michigan-based company that provides remote patient monitoring services meant to help seniors and people with disabilities live independently, avoid unnecessary hospitalization and manage their chronic disease.

Founded in 2006 by Jeffrey Prough, the company offers a range of services including at-home wellness coaching, medication management, telehealth services and in-home vital sign monitoring.

CST provides services nationwide to more than 100,000 patients and has partnerships with 1,500 payers. In 2009, the company acquired Link to Life, an emergency home response company that also provides transportation and continuing care services.

Best Buy’s acquisition of CST builds on the company’s $800 million purchase of Great Call last year, which served to steer the company’s business in a strategic direction towards providing technology products, services and solutions to the aging population.

Earlier this year, the company partnered with startup TytoCare to become the first major retail distributor for its at-home self examination telehealth devices.

“We are excited about the prospects of combining CST’s services and relationships with the existing GreatCall business,” outgoing Best Buy CEO Hubery Joly said during company’s first quarter earnings call.

“More broadly, this tuck-in acquisition, together with GreatCall, complements our existing capabilities like Geek Squad and In-Home Advisors to better serve both the seniors in their home and those who support them like payers and providers.”

Joly pointed to CST’s existing book of business with Medicare Advantage patients as a potential avenue of growth for Best Buy’s relationships with insurers.

Among the company’s publicly announced healthcare partnerships are a five-year contract with Senior Whole Health of Massachusetts to provide in-home passive monitoring services for high-risk seniors and a partnership with long-term care insurer CNA to provide Great Call’s in-home passive remote monitoring solution and medical alert device to policyholders.

Joly’s replacement, Corie Barry, who currently serves as CFO and strategic transformation officer, said she considered a health a “longer term value driver” for the company and outlined how the company’s technology products and services model is aligned with supporting older Americans.

“We are agnostic across ecosystems, so we will help you with whatever technology you already have or whatever technology you want to put in,” Barry said. “And as we bring on GreatCall’s assets, their ability to help us with the human touch combined with more predictive analytics, it becomes very powerful because then you not only start to see major medical events might happen, but we have some of that human intervention that also is helpful.”

Photo: Kritchanut, Getty Images

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