The news: Best Buy incurred $109 million in restructuring costs in its first quarter fiscal year 2026, chiefly related to its health business.

How we got here: Best Buy acquired Current Health, a developer of hospital-at-home technology, for $400 million in 2021—a move that turbocharged the retailer’s Best Buy Health business.

• Current Health’s care-at-home technology is sold to health systems that care for patients in their homes.
• Best Buy’s Geek Squad unit provides technical support services for health system partners, which include setting up health tech devices in patients’ homes and educating consumers on how to use them.

Best Buy was quite bullish on its health division. Two years ago, the company projected that in 2024, its healthcare unit sales would grow faster than its base business. In its health segment, Best Buy also sells a medical alert device that detects falls, heart and blood pressure monitors, and OTC hearing aids.

What went wrong? Best Buy CEO Corie Barry pointed to two market factors that have caused slower adoption of its at-home healthcare solutions.

A Medicare waiver that reimburses hospitals for at-home care might not be extended under the Trump administration.

• The waiver allowed health systems to free up capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing hospital-level care in patients’ homes, and was subsequently extended a few times.
• But it’s unclear if the Trump administration and Congress are interested in continuing these efforts for several more years, which is causing some health systems to scale back their hospital-at-home efforts, per Modern Healthcare.

Some of Best Buy’s health system customers have financially struggled over the last few years. The retailer didn’t provide more details, but we will note that most large health systems seem to be rebounding now that patients are getting surgeries and other procedures after putting them off during the pandemic.

The final word: Barry said on the most recent earnings call that Best Buy’s at-home healthcare products and services are still viable. But the company's success with hospital-at-home will largely depend on the Trump administration’s appetite to devote Medicare dollars to such initiatives. Best Buy is separately figuring out how to mitigate the impact of tariffs since many of its products come from China, Vietnam, and India—the retailer may not be able to sustain its home healthcare investments for much longer if pressures persist.

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