Current Health is a health technology company founded in Edinburgh in 2014 that develops infrastructure for delivering acute and complex care outside traditional hospital settings. Its platform combines an FDA-cleared wearable, passive biometric monitoring, AI-enabled detection tools and a 24/7 clinical team. The company supports healthcare providers and life-sciences organizations across advanced treatments and other complex car-at-home models.
What problem were you trying to solve when you founded Current Health?
I studied computer science in Glasgow and medicine in Dundee, and founded Current Health as a third-year medical student. My grandmother had COPD, heart failure, dementia, poor eyesight and limited mobility, and was repeatedly admitted to hospital for problems that I believed could and should have been managed at home. Structural, technological, financial and clinical gaps prevented her from receiving that care.
We entered the US in March 2020 with Baptist Health in Kentucky, two weeks before the COVID lockdowns. Demand grew rapidly, and the model became known as “Hospital-at-home”. Today, we support 50% of the US hospital-at-home market on any given day. We later began applying the same infrastructure to CAR T and bispecific therapies. A recent study found that CAR T produced remission lasting ten years in nearly a third of patients with B-cell lymphoma; not long ago, many would have died within months. We help make these therapies available without requiring a two- or three-week hospital stay.
What does it mean to operate as care-delivery infrastructure rather than a remote-monitoring company?
Monitoring is a feature, not the purpose. Monitoring someone means nothing unless you can act on what you find. We identify which patient is becoming unwell and provide the technology and clinical services needed to intervene, including at two in the morning. Hospitals often underestimate how resource-intensive that is. Staff covering wards around the clock cannot suddenly manage 200 patients dispersed across the community, which is why we built our own clinical team.
Care at home also requires different clinical expertise. A patient with heart failure who walks upstairs will breathe faster; a patient lying in a hospital bed may not. One of the biggest advantages of patients receiving care at home as an alternative to hospitalization is that they will move around much more, but that’s also one of the biggest challenges. We have had to understand how illness presents when people are mobile and living normally. Each physician sets the threshold for which patients can be treated safely at home, and we work within agreed protocols. The technology must also integrate with existing systems—usually Epic in the US, alongside command centers and other hospital infrastructure—so that home-based care does not become a parallel system.
What would it take to bring advanced cancer therapies beyond major academic centers?
Academic centers adopted these treatments first because the researchers were based there and because those institutions already had the infusion centers, staff and financial resources to deliver them. Yet 80% of cancer care in America takes place in community practices rather than hospitals. The infrastructure therefore has to become repeatable, scalable and affordable enough for a small organization in rural southern Texas to access the same capabilities as a hospital in New York.
The principal barriers are infrastructure and finance. Providers must monitor patients at home, recognize and treat adverse events, and manage the usual 15-day post-infusion period. CAR T can cost half a million dollars per treatment because it is extraordinarily complex to manufacture, which has made insurers cautious. The shift to outpatient delivery has been led by hematologists who demonstrated that it can be safe and effective with minimal time in the hospital. We provide the technology and services that allow them to put that model into practice.
How does Current Health distinguish meaningful deterioration from background data?
Current Health was never about presenting clinicians with a stream of continuous monitoring data. The purpose was to collect passive data and identify which patient was at risk. We built large datasets around adverse events occurring in the home—information that had not previously been gathered because these patients had not been monitored in this way.
That dataset is allowing us to train AI models to predict adverse events. The aim is not to send clinicians more alerts or information. It is to identify the small number of patients who genuinely need intervention and make that information actionable.
What is the economic case for Hospital-at-home?
Hospital-at-home reduces the cost of care. In the US, the physical hospital facility represents roughly one third of the cost base. Removing that element frees resources for social work, physical rehabilitation and other support. Patients also avoid hospital-acquired infections and often recover better, which lowers readmissions. In CAR T, we can avoid a two- or three-week hospital stay and reduce rehospitalization. The UK’s virtual wards have likewise demonstrated reductions in total cost.
Payers recognize the model, but not sufficiently. Changes to Medicaid and the aftermath of COVID—when some people went without care for roughly two and a half years—have intensified pressure. Alternative payment models still need to evolve, and costs can reach patients: Medicare covers people over 65 but carries a 20% copay. With an older population living longer with chronic conditions, the home will have to become a permanent site of care.
What did Current Health’s experience under Best Buy ownership reveal about consumer companies entering healthcare?
After COVID, when the market was at its height, many large companies wanted to establish a role in healthcare. They brought valuable experience in creating better consumer services, but healthcare is not simply a matter of improving the customer experience. Doctors have more patients than they have time to see. Patients may be extremely ill, homeless, unable to afford medication or unwilling to take it. The underlying incentives and circumstances are extraordinarily complex.
Many outside entrants discovered that healthcare is difficult to change and that meaningful innovation takes time. Epic is arguably the most successful technology company in healthcare, and it is 40 years old. I am not sure every large company entering the sector understood how long the process would take.
What separates genuine care redesign from simply layering technology onto existing services?
Someone recently asked me how to adopt technology without disrupting existing services. I said, “I don’t understand the question.” If the patient journey remains unchanged and technology is simply layered on top, all you do is add cost. Successful organizations use what is now possible to change the model, workflow and entire care experience.
Sarah Cannon, Mass General Brigham and Advocate Health have approached the challenge by saying, in effect, “Let’s completely change the model,” and they have been phenomenally successful. Other organizations keep programs small and controlled and achieve much less. The essential cultural shift is from seeing yourself as a hospital to seeing yourself as an organization that delivers healthcare across an entire community. “We are not just a hospital” has to become the starting point.
