Blog | 7/8/2025

Care at Home: Scaling Promise Meets Growing Pains

By Greg Chittim and Jeff Abraham

Hospital-at-home continues to be a rising pillar of value-based care—offering (theoretically) lower costs and better outcomes by delivering acute-level care directly in patients’ homes. Despite the potential win-win-win for patients, providers, and payers the uptake per site reveals that though home care is expanding geographically, it is not close to scale yet. Best Buy’s divestiture of Current Health highlights the growing pains in the sector - while hospital-at-home programs are expanding geographically, their uptake remains far from widespread. Challenges impeding scale include a lack of standardized protocols, difficulties in patient identification, and limited commercial insurance contracts. However, the most significant barrier is the unstable waiver environment and fluctuating health policies.

Despite these hurdles, there are encouraging signs of progress. For example, Samsung’s acquisition of Xealth signals a drive toward tighter integration between digital health tools and clinical workflows. Such innovative collaborations suggest that hospital-at-home will not only grow but also converge with other remote care models targeting chronic disease management.

The ultimate winners in this space will likely be those who successfully blend clinical credibility, technology integration, operational scale, and strong payer-provider partnerships. Is it platform players like Samsung, or provider-led models with validated outcomes that will break through? Success may ultimately depend on who best solves for patient engagement, clinician trust, and seamless workflow integration at scale.