What could have happened in the home care industry didn’t. In 2012, based on interviews with the best and the brightest in and around the home care industry, an idea was born and documented. It was radical – the idea of a network for sharing relevant information across organizational boundaries about a home care recipient with stakeholders, family, health providers. In this vision, the care recipient was at the center of this information sharing across the stages and steps of living independently, senior housing, rehab, hospital, and home. Instead of this vision outlined in The Future of Home Care Technology 2012, we have today’s franchised and fragmented home care industry – regionally focused, achieving the most minimal advances in technology deployment.
Best Buy has signed an agreement to acquire Current Health, a leading care-at-home technology platform that brings together remote patient monitoring, telehealth, and patient engagement into a single solution for healthcare organizations.
August should have been a sleepy month – but no. Multiple interesting acquisitions during August make tech and older adults intriguing. Early in the month, the largest franchised home care company (Home Instead) was acquired by a tech upstart, Honor – to ‘scale up home care’. Connect America, which had already acquired the 'aging and caregiving business of' Philips Lifeline, then acquired a remote patient (RPM) monitoring startup and AI-virtual assistant company called 100plus. Investor interest in age-tech startups is growing, older adults are certainly aging – synergy between these phenomena will certainly follow. The blog posts for August:
Honor buys Home Instead: one of the newest acquires one of the oldest. Honor, a recipient of $255 million in total investment (Series D in October, 2020), has pivoted here and there since its $20 million-fueled launch in 2015, always intent on disrupting the home care industry. For a while, many in the industry were skeptical. They viewed it as a threat – see interviewee comments in 2017’s Tech-Enabled Home Care. Honor began as a home care company, then a home care tech platform company and buyer of smaller home care companies -- bulking up prior to Friday, when it acquired the largest home care company in both the US and UK– Home Instead.
SAN FRANCISCO and OMAHA, Neb., Aug. 6, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Honor and Home Instead announced today that Honor Technology, Inc. has acquired Home Instead, Inc., effective Aug. 6. The acquisition brings together the largest, highest-touch home care network and the leading home care technology and operations platform to transform the professional caregiver and client experience and revolutionize care for older adults.
What could have happened in the home care industry didn’t. 
August should have been a sleepy month – but no. 
Honor buys Home Instead: one of the newest acquires one of the oldest. 