Christopher McGhee’s career has the shape of a boomerang. He started a company in Scotland, carried it across the Atlantic, sold it to a giant American retailer, left, and then returned to buy it back. The neat version would end with the acquisition. McGhee’s version gets interesting after the applause.
Current Health began in Edinburgh in 2014 under the name Snap40. McGhee was studying medicine at the University of Dundee, having already earned a computer science degree from the University of Strathclyde. One discipline taught him to think in systems; the other put him close enough to the ward to notice where those systems failed. His grandmother’s repeated hospital admissions made the problem personal. He believed some of that care could have happened at home, but the practical machinery was missing.
The first answer was a wearable monitor. It was the sort of product that photographs well and pitches cleanly: put a device on the body, collect useful signals, catch deterioration earlier. McGhee and co-founder Stewart Whiting entered the idea in the 2014 Converge Challenge and won its KickStart prize. Soon, however, the founders discovered the charming nuisance at the center of enterprise healthcare: the attractive gadget is only the opening sentence.
The early awards gave that sentence room to continue. The project also won Scottish EDGE and Scottish Young EDGE support while McGhee was still close to university life. By the end of his third year in medicine, he faced the old founder’s argument between a credible path and an insistent idea. He left the course to build full-time. Whiting supplied the engineering partnership that would survive name changes, funding rounds and an acquisition. Years later, when McGhee announced his first departure, he singled out his co-founder with unusually direct affection. The compliment mattered because Current Health was never a solo myth. It was a collaboration that grew through clinicians, engineers and operators in two countries.
A sensor meets the real world
Moving care out of a hospital is not a matter of moving a screen. A device must arrive, connect and behave. Data has to enter the clinical record. An alert needs an owner. A patient needs a person to call. Nurses need a workflow that does not turn them into technical support. At the end, someone has to retrieve the equipment, clean it and send it out again. The home may be more comfortable than a ward, but it is less standardized than one.
Current Health widened around that reality. What began as monitoring became a platform joining devices, patient communication, clinical dashboards, electronic-record integration and round-the-clock support. It worked with NHS trusts in Britain, then health systems in the United States. EU regulatory clearance arrived in 2017. FDA clearance followed in 2019. The company raised a $43 million Series B in 2021 and, over its development, more than $70 million in venture capital.
Reliable signals at home
Who sees, decides and acts?
Deliver, install, retrieve
Put data where teams work
There is a reusable founder lesson in the expansion. A technical wedge earns attention; the annoying adjacent chores earn trust. McGhee did not cling to the romance of a single invention. The company kept absorbing the dependencies required to produce the promised result. In software, people call this a platform. In practice, it is an agreement to care about every handoff nobody else wants.
The transatlantic founder
McGhee is from Scotland’s west coast. Current Health’s first foothold was Scottish, its first customers British and its engineering base remained in Edinburgh. Yet the larger opportunity pulled the company toward America. McGhee eventually settled in Boston. When he was asked how the company managed the jump, his answer was less a framework than an airfare: “get on a plane.” Do everything the team would do if it were already headquartered in the United States.
It is a wonderfully unmagical piece of advice. No funnel diagram. No solemn acronym. Just proximity, repetition and jet lag. The company entered the US market after FDA clearance and built relationships with large health systems. McGhee later said it served nine of the country’s top 20 health systems during his first tenure. Scale brought a fresh problem: the final mile into thousands of unpredictable homes.
“The future of healthcare is in the home and the community, and we have a role to play in that transformation.”Christopher McGhee, on returning to Current Health
That is where Best Buy appeared. In 2021, the pairing looked odd enough to be clever. Current Health understood clinical technology and care workflows. Best Buy understood supply chains, consumer electronics and in-home installation. Its Geek Squad already sent thousands of people into homes to make complicated devices cooperate. The retailer acquired Current Health for a reported $400 million that October.
McGhee spoke appreciatively about the fit. Best Buy could help move kits quickly, handle setup and support the physical service layer. Current Health kept considerable autonomy. New partnerships followed, and the company expanded its work across hospital-at-home, remote monitoring and complex therapies. The founder had built the kind of startup story business schools enjoy: a personal problem, a regulatory moat, a transatlantic market and an unexpected strategic buyer.
Exit, pause, return
In March 2024, McGhee left Current Health. His farewell credited a global team that had grown to nearly 300 people and thanked Whiting, whom he called the smartest person he knew. He wrote that he was excited to “get back to 0.” It sounded like a founder preparing to aim at a fresh blank page.
The blank page turned out to have an old company’s name at the top. In June 2025, McGhee announced that he had reacquired Current Health from Best Buy and was returning as CEO. Whiting and other former colleagues also came back. The price was not disclosed. McGhee said the business still had strong customers, product and people - enough of a foundation to resume building independently.
Buying back a company is more revealing than founding one. A first-time founder can be intoxicated by possibility. A returning founder has seen the invoices. McGhee knew the slow sales cycles, regulations, operational tangles and cultural resistance. He had also seen the business inside a corporation. He returned anyway, asking for startup speed with the benefit of institutional scar tissue.
“I’m really trying to take us back to our scrappy startup roots.”Christopher McGhee, 2025
Ambition gets specific
McGhee’s public ambition is enormous: he has said he wants to build Current Health into the world’s largest healthcare organization. The operating plan beneath that line is notably concrete. He has described four priorities: expand monitoring and clinical support; use AI and automation to let programs scale economically; orchestrate the many technologies and services entering a home; and align Current Health’s business model with the way its customers are paid.
The renewed company is concentrating on acute and complex work, including advanced therapies and hospital-level care at home. It is also tightening the operational chain. In March 2026, Current Health announced work with Cardinal Health’s Velocare to handle fulfillment, installation and retrieval of monitoring kits. McGhee called the last mile one of the largest constraints on growth. Once again, the grand future arrived disguised as a delivery schedule.
His orbit has widened beyond the company. In July 2026, he joined the board of Element Care, a Massachusetts nonprofit serving older adults. The appointment loops back to the family experience behind Current Health. There is also a literal return to Dundee: McGhee and Dr Jo-Ann Nugent, whom he met at the university, donated £25,000 to establish an entrepreneurship prize. The first McGhee Award funded two ventures chosen for their potential local and global impact.
None of this makes the second act inevitable. Healthcare remains a thicket of incentives, temporary payment rules and habits built around buildings. McGhee has said the status quo is the largest obstacle. The home is not a blank clinical canvas, and an elegant dashboard cannot bully economics into cooperating. Current Health must make programs useful for patients, workable for clinicians and sustainable for institutions at the same time.
Still, McGhee’s loop has given him an unusually complete view of the problem: student inventor, regulated-device founder, enterprise software seller, acquired executive, outsider and returning owner. He began with the idea that the right signal, seen early, could change an outcome. A decade later, his lesson appears broader. Signals matter. So do couriers, nurses, records, reimbursement and the small indignities of setup.
Founders are often told to fall in love with the problem. McGhee went one step further and repurchased it. The exit was worth $400 million on paper. The return suggests he still measures the story by unfinished work.
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