Best Buy wrote down $475M and restructured its health unit as in-home care stalled

Best Buy spent years building a health business on top of its electronics retail base: buying emergency-response firm GreatCall in 2018, senior remote-monitoring company Critical Signal Technologies in 2019, and UK home-care platform Current Health in 2021, then signing program deals with health systems including Mass General Brigham, Geisinger and Atrium Health to support hospital-at-home and remote patient monitoring.

That bet depended partly on the federal government's Acute Hospital Care At Home waiver, a COVID-era program that let Medicare-certified facilities bill for inpatient-level care delivered in patients' homes. The waiver has only ever been extended in short bursts, and by early 2025 its future was uncertain again, compounding financial strain already hitting the hospital systems Best Buy needed as partners.

In its fiscal Q4 2025 earnings (period ended Feb. 1, 2025), Best Buy recorded a non-cash $475 million goodwill impairment tied to a downward revision of the health segment's long-term financial projections. The company then began restructuring the unit, logging a further $109 million in charges in fiscal Q1 2026, reported in earnings released Thursday, May 29, 2025.

No financial recovery yet: a $109M further charge, and a narrower unit built around parts called viable — Lively phones, active aging — with in-home health pulled back.

In-home health services were scaling more slowly than the acquisitions had assumed, CEO Corie Barry said on the Q1 earnings call.

The hospital-at-home waiver's on-again, short-extension status made it hard for health system partners to commit to long-term programs.

Health-system partners were themselves under financial pressure from market volatility, tariffs and potential Medicaid cuts, weakening demand for the programs the unit was built around.

A string of acquisitions built on a regulatory assumption (the Medicare hospital-at-home waiver staying in place) needs a fallback plan for the day that assumption stops holding.

Best Buy did not disclose further restructuring specifics beyond the charges. Barry said Lively-branded senior phones and medical alerts, plus parts of the care-at-home business, "remain very viable business models for the future," while CFO Matthew Bilunas pointed to "ongoing efficiencies and effectiveness work streams" including at the health unit. The company framed its longer-term view — consumers managing more of their own health through technology — as unchanged even as the in-home health push was scaled back.