The Virtual Senior Center (VSC) program, which CAST Patron Selfhelp Community Services launched in 2010, will be expanding to Pittsburgh this summer. VSC also operates in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and San Diego.
People with vision, hearing, or dexterity loss can find tips for using their smartphones, iPads, and tablets in a new guide from OASIS. The nonprofit educational organization promotes healthy aging through lifelong learning, healthy living, and social engagement.
Recently, Merrill Lynch, in partnership with Age Wave, released the report Home in Retirement: More Freedom, New Choices, in which they surveyed nearly 3,000 older adults on a range of topics related to homeownership and the choices of where to live in retirement.
The report confirmed a number of factors we’ve come to know and understand about the choice of where to live as we age. They found that:
- The # 1 reason for relocating during one’s retirement years, cited by 29% of retirees, was a desire to be closer to family.
- As we age, our home’s emotional value becomes more important than its financial value.
- 85% of retirees say that their top preference is to receive long-term care in their home, if needed, rather than in a community environment.
This last point led to a portion of the report exploring the topic of home improvements and modifications retirees have made or are considering that would make their homes a more suitable environment in which to live longer. As you’d imagine, technology solutions were cited as being important, and one particular list caught my attention. Not so much because a majority of retirees were interested in technology solutions to support aging in their current residence, but because it was so evident that senior living communities already provide the benefits people are seeking. Perhaps not delivered in the same way, but equally effective.
Here are 5 points they highlighted:
Consumer Desire #1
80% of retirees are interested in new technologies to reduce their home expenses, such as smart thermostats.
Community Benefit
Communities offer all-inclusive monthly fees that are predictable and use the power of volume purchasing to insulate individual residents from spikes in food, energy and transportation costs
Consumer Desire #2
76% are interested in technologies to monitor their health at home, such as sensors, alerts or medication reminder apps.
Community Benefit
Many communities have on-site clinics or visiting medical practitioners conveniently available to residents, as well as providing wellness services such as flu shots. Plus, having friends and professionals available to help if an emergency happens, essentially eliminates the need for alerts.
Consumer Desire #3
67% are interested in home technologies to help them optimize their health, such as devices for air purification or to improve sleep.
Community Benefit
From fitness centers, to nutrition and dining, to social opportunities, communities provide residents with a path to maintain and even improve their overall health and well-being.
Consumer Desire #4
64% are interested in home technologies to connect them with family and friends, such as video chat and interactive devices.
Community Benefit
Beyond the connections made between residents and staff, many communities are using communication technologies as well as trained staff to support residents in their desire to stay connected.
Community Desire #5
58% are interested in technologies to help them maintain their home, such as cleaning robots or heated driveways.
Community Benefit
A move to a community eliminates the need for home upkeep, and the services – such as housekeeping and transportation – make life simpler and more manageable.
A person’s desire to remain at home is understandable, and more services in the coming years will join those already promising to make aging in place easier and more manageable.
Clearly though, full-service senior living communities provide much of what consumers say they want. And they provide those benefits not with cold impersonal technology, but with caring, thoughtful people offering the power of human connection, along with the practical benefits of supporting a higher quality of life.
This article by Ken Curnes was reprinted with permission from GlynnDevins
In a letter to every member of the U.S. Senate, Larry Minnix urged support for S. 1916, the Rural Health Care Connectivity Act, when it comes to a vote on the floor.
The bill would give skilled nursing facilities in rural areas access to the Universal Service Fund's Rural Health Care Program. The RHCP provides funding for telecommunications
and broadband services used to provide health care in rural communities.
The connectivity provided under the bill would
support a wide array of potential technology-enabled services, including
telehealth, medication management, remote monitoring, health information
exchange, care coordination, and social connectedness.
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation recently approved S. 1916, but floor consideration has not yet been scheduled. A similar bill, H.R. 4111, has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.
A recent Ziegler CFO HotlineSM survey focused on the topic of Healthcare IT, which gained insight into the implementation of information technologies being utilized in the healthcare sector, particularly in the post-acute spectrum. Questions also assessed usage among staff and residents. Nearly 180 senior living Chief Financial Officers (CFO) participated in the poll; roughly 60% were from single-site organizations and 40% represented multi-site providers.
The initial question asked was about the adoption of EMR/EHR (Electronic Medical Records/Electronic Health Records) in their assisted living or skilled nursing levels of care. Overall, nearly 8 out of 10 indicated that they have adopted an EMR/EHR system. The percentage for multi-site respondents was slightly higher at 85.7%.
When asked who the vendor is for the EMR system, the largest proportion, nearly 37% indicated that they utilize AOD. HealthMEDX was second, mentioned by roughly 2 out of 10 of the respondents. Those who responded "other" mentioned vendors such as American Data, MatrixCare, Optimus and SigmaCare. Of those who reported having only an EMR system in assisted living or skilled nursing, several indicated that it is integrated with the local hospital EMR. Fewer than 6% reported this type of integration with their local hospital.
The survey also asked about wireless infrastructures on the campus. Approximately 9 out of 10 respondents indicated that they have installed a wireless infrastructure on their campus. When broken out separately by type of organization, the multi-site providers were more likely to have campus-wide wireless than single-site providers.
Additional questions were asked about resident and staff usage of various technology devices. When asked about staff use of mobile devices for work-related items, 77.4% of the respondents indicated that their staff does use mobile technologies.
To access the full copy of the survey results and review additional survey findings, please click here .
This article by Lisa McCracken, Senior Vice President of Senior Living Research & Development, Ziegler, was printed with permission.
On Oct. 27, 2016, LeadingAge CAST Supporter HealthMEDX® was acquired by Netsmart, which is building a comprehensive platform to serve community-based providers and position them for value-based healthcare.
After a year’s worth of collecting data and opinions, experts from the field of aging presented new ideas and initiatives at the 2015 White House Conference on Aging. The White House has just published the final report on the conference.
The White House Conference on Aging facilitated a national conversation on growing older in America. Several LeadingAge members participated in pre-conference regional forums, we hosted a watch party and contributed recommendations on long-term services and supports and the application of technology. Some of the most significant developments resulting from the conference:
- A Call for Caregiver Support Systems: Panelists stressed the importance of establishing support systems for the nation’s 50 million professional and family caregivers, whose numbers will double by the year 2050.
- CMS Proposed Rule: CMS proposed Reform of Requirements for Long-Term Care Facilities, which would affect more than 15,000 nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities. A element of the proposal is new standards for coordinating facility-to-facility patient transfers in order to improve quality of life, enhance person-centered care and services for residents in nursing homes, and improve resident safety.
- HHS Secretary Announces Funding for Workforce: Sylvia Burwell, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced $35.7 million for a new Geriatric Workforce Enhancement Program, preparing the health care workforce to respond to the needs associated with advancing age.
- Dementia Friendly America: A coalition of private sector organizations announced the Dementia Friendly America initiative, which was created to foster communities that are equipped to support people with dementia and their families. There are currently plans to build 15 new pilot sites across the country.
- Aging.gov: The White House announced Aging.gov, a new one-stop resource providing a spectrum of federal information and resources to older Americans, their families, and caregivers.
- President to Push for Workplace Retirement Savings Program: About 1/3 of the workforce lacks access to a workplace retirement plan. President Obama announced that he will push to provide access for 30 million Americans to workplace-based retirement savings by requiring employers not currently offering a retirement plan to automatically enroll their workers in an IRA.
- Surgeon General Advocates for Culture of Prevention: Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States, called for a "culture of prevention in America," saying, “The nation has a high rate of obesity; almost half of adults have some chronic condition. The solution is a combination of healthy nutrition, physical activity and mental health care.”
- SNAP to Fund Meals on Wheels: U.S. Department of Agriculture will increase accessibility to critical nutrition for homebound, older Americans and people with disabilities by enabling Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to be used for services that purchase and deliver food to these households, such as Meals on Wheels.
- Action on Elder Abuse Protection: With the alarming number of elder abuse victims in mind, the U.S. Department of Justice will fund a multi-year project to evaluate how to avoid and respond to elder abuse. Also, the Justice Department will train prosecutors around the country on how to effectively curb elder abuse and financial exploitation.
- LeadingAge Hackfest: Lastly, we were excited to see the report on the conference list LeadingAge as an aging services technology leader and mention the HackFest held at our annual meeting in Boston. HackFest participants were able to use the Hewlett-Packard (HP) 3D immersive Sprout computing platform as well as federal open data to help create technology-driven tools that help older adults and their families.
What keeps you up at night?
If you’re the leader of a continuing care retirement community (CCRC), your first response to that question might focus on the competition you face from for-profit companies interested in developing communities to serve the expanding older market.
If that’s what you’re thinking, you may be worried about the wrong thing.
Sure, for-profit competition can’t be ignored. But the financial stability of your organization probably faces a greater threat from the growing number of older adults who are choosing to stay in their own homes rather than moving to your CCRC.
Need to be convinced that the stay-at-home trend is a real issue in today’s marketplace? Look no further than the flurry of articles that appeared last week about a new, well-financed start-up called Honor.
This new venture could soon become your organization’s worst nightmare—unless, of course, you’ve already begun to reposition your CCRC to be as attractive as possible to the changing consumer.
Your marketing effort must recognize the desire of older adults to stay at home—and it should be geared to “making the case” for the benefits of moving into a CCRC.
However, you also should be taking steps to serve the growing number of older consumers who simply want to stay put and will never move into a CCRC.
Honor: An Uber Service for Home-Based Services
What is Honor? The new company bills itself as “the most complete redo of home care you can imagine.”
Think of it as an Uber-like service that connects in-home caregivers with older adults and their families, much like Uber connects its freelance drivers with consumers who want a ride.
Honor isn’t trying to be a home health agency. It’s focusing its attention on recruiting non-medical caregivers who can help older adults stay at home even if they need help getting around the house, driving to the grocery store, or cooking their meals.
A recent TechCrunch article explains just how efficiently Honor matches a consumer’s need with a caregiver’s expertise.
Technology looms large in this business model. Honor is basically a software platform that connects the older consumer, his or her family members, the professional caregiver, and the company:
- Older adults get an “Honor Frame” appliance with a screen that lets them know who their caregivers are and when they will arrive at their home.
- In-home caregivers get an app that helps them keep track of job offers from Honor.
- Families use a mobile app to see who took care of an older relative on a particular day, what the caregiver did, and for how long.
- Honor also uses its platform to monitor the caregiver and to prevent fraud and abuse.
Honor screens prospective caregivers through in-person interviews and what Business Insider calls “deep background checks.” Those checks must be pretty thorough: only 5% of the caregivers vetted so far have been accepted into the service, according to Business Insider.
All You Need to Know About Honor
You only need to know 3 things about Honor to realize how hot the field of home-delivered services is becoming:
- Honor is wired for success. Honor founder Seth Sternberg made his first $100 million by selling a messaging service to Google. So, rest assured that this new idea comes from someone who knows his way around profit-making ventures.
- Honor has plenty of money. So far, the start-up has raised $20 million from what Tech Crunch calls “the A-list of Silicon Valley.” That includes $15 million from Andreessen-Horowitz, a $4 billion venture capital firm, and additional funding from Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Who knows how much more money the company can raise once it completes beta testing in Contra Costa County, CA.
- Honor is flexible and customizable. These attributes alone meet the 2 biggest demands of the next cohort of older consumers. Families can book Honor for as little as 1 hour a week. And Honor promises to find you a caregiver who fits your unique needs, and even speaks your language. The company’s goal is to have 2 million of those caregivers in its ranks before long.
Wake-Up Call for CCRCs
How many times in your life have you heard about a great idea like Honor, hit yourself on the side of the head, and exclaimed, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
It wouldn’t surprise me if leaders of every CCRC in the nation reacted to Honor with that exclamation.
Let’s be honest. You should have thought of this first.
But now is not the time to cry over spilt milk. It’s time to join in and adopt this innovative approach to service delivery.
LeadingAge members should -- and could -- be offering an Honor-like service to older adults who live in their own homes.
You have the expertise to manage in-home services and to vet in-home caregivers. You’ve been doing this for years -- and, frankly, you’re very good at it.
Many of you simply need to hire people with the technological expertise to help you streamline your delivery system so it’s easy for consumers to tap into the great services you provide.
Honor provides a great business model, but it doesn’t have to be the only game in town. Get started now to figure out how you can get a piece of the action.
AARP Foundation's program Mentor Up connects teens and young adults with older generations to "reverse mentor" seniors on new technology skills and more.
While the program provides many outlets for the generations to learn from each other, one of the main focuses is technology. Studies show that 25% of Americans between 50-64 are unable to use the internet.
Technology is second nature to younger generations and a new world to older ones. Volunteers spend about 30 minutes teaching seniors basic skills to text or send emails.
To learn more about incorporating this program in your activities or to volunteer, visit Mentor Up.
LeadingAge CAST produces and publishes a comprehensive portfolio of hands-on resources that help providers understand, plan for, select, implement and adopt the appropriate technology while advocating for innovative care models and maintaining a provider-centric focus.
The complete portfolio of Medication Management tools includes:
- Medication Management Technologies for Long-Term and Post-Acute Care: A Primer and Provider (see below for the detailed table of contents linked to an HTML version also click here for the PDF version)
- CAST Medication Management Interactive Guide
- Online Medication Management Selection Tool
- Medication Management Selection Matrix (Click here for the Excel version for sorting)
- 2016 Medication Management Case Studies:
Detailed Table of Content
- Purpose of the Whitepaper, Executive Summary, and Disclaimer
- Definition of Medication Management Process
- Problems Associated with Medication Management
- Medication Management Strategies
- Types and Uses of Available Medication Management Technologies
- Benefits of Different Medication Management Technologies
- Potential LTPAC Provider Business Models
- Planning for and Selecting Appropriate Medication Management Solutions
- Selection Matrix Elements
- Acknowledgement of Contributors
- References and Resources
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