Helping Caregivers Organize Information

Which technology tools should we clinicians recommend to the caregivers of elders?

This is the question I found myself musing on a few months ago, as I was preparing to give a talk related to technology at a Family Caregiver Alliance retreat for younger caregivers.

There are, of course, quite a lot of apps, services, sensors, and other various interesting technologies available. So many, that it’s quite hard to keep up with them all.

So instead, I decided to start by thinking of a few key areas in which I’d seen tools really help caregivers better manage an older person’s health needs.

I came up with four key categories of tools that I’ve recommended to families:

• Journal/notebook, for notes and symptom tracking
• Portable and up-to-date medication list
• Organizer to keep copies of medical results and medical records (also known as a personal health record)
• Personal/family task organizer

At the retreat, we discussed the purpose and benefits of using these tools. Then we talked about some options for each kind of tool, including a few apps that I’ve tried for each purpose. Because the conversation was so fun and interesting, I ended up trying to summarize the key points (and some tech options) in the series of posts linked to above. (They are on my Geriatrics for Caregivers blog.)

Tools, I might add, do not necessarily need to be high tech. In going through the options for addressing each category above, we started by talking about the pen-and-paper approach, and then moved on to increasingly specialized digital options.

It is, of course, better to have information on paper than not documented at all. (Pew found that 44% of caregivers were tracking health issues just in their heads!) But the nice thing about things like computers, the Internet, smartphones, and even some apps is that they often — but not always — make it easier for us to collect and organize information.

Still, like many things that are “good for you”, it’s all easier said than done. Getting more organized usually requires behavior changes and some effort, especially at the beginning.

Personally, I’d love to see clinicians and primary care teams be ready to help patients and caregivers with the tools above; when properly used, these kinds of information tools can have lots of benefits. Tracking symptoms and response to a treatment strategy can lead to faster resolution of bothersome health problems. Carrying around an up-to-date medication list and copies of key medical data often leads to safer, more coordinated medical care. And figuring out an approach to keeping track of what needs to get done can help caregivers from feeling too overwhelmed.

So, the potential for benefit is there. We just need to find usable tools, and make it all manageable for patients and caregivers. (It’s also nice when the information gets back to the clinicians in a form that’s easy to use.)

If you are a clinician or otherwise work with caregivers of elders, what kinds of tools have you recommended for the purposes listed above?