GeriTech

In Search of Technology that Improves Geriatric Care

Recap on Caregiving & Technology at Health 2.0

Last week I attended the Annual Fall Health 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley. It’s a big event and there was lots to see and think about.

Of particular interest to me was a set of pre-sessions titled “Future Technologies for Caregiving” and “Easing the Burden: Connected Caregiving Tools.”

The first session was based on the “Catalyzing Technology to Support Family Caregiving” report which came out this past summer; the report itself was based on an expert roundtable convened in April. That group identified three types of tech solutions as especially interesting to them:

  • An “Intelligent Family Care Assistant” to help with day-to-day caregiving by helping to coordinate the family’s tasks in the context of the family’s other activities.
  • “Wearable technologies”—devices worn on or placed in the body, with sensors and/or human interfaces—to help monitor a person’s health and overall condition.
  • Technologies that provide better connections between family caregivers and health professionals, enabling them to work more effectively as a team in providing care.
(Clinicians, how do these sound to you? Post a comment below!)
The report’s core recommendations included:
  • Create better “concept maps” and find more appropriate language to describe the varied and complex caregiving landscape. 
    • LK’s note: the report doesn’t cite much academic literature, but caregiving scholars have been working on this for a while. Some, like Professor Rhonda Montgomery at the University of Wisconsin, have even developed really nifty practical caregiver assessment tools, like this “Tailored Caregiver Assessment & Referral” tool, which improved outcomes in this preliminary randomized study.)
  • Continue to collect extensive data about the prevalence, burden, and impact of caregiving and the role of technology.
  • Spur a broad national conversation on caregiving.
  • Develop compelling business cases for employers and healthcare providers to support caregiving.
  • Provide caregiving coaching as an integral component of all solutions.
  • Inspire social conversations about caregiving to encourage more learning and support within families and communities.

(All main bullet points above are verbatim from the executive summary of the report.)

In the “Connected Caregiving Tools” follow-up session, four companies demoed their products, and then their executives took questions from the crowd, and from the moderator, RWJF Senior Program Officer Michael Painter.
The four companies were CareSync, CareTicker, Independa, and GrandCare.
Below is a Storify with my tweets related to these sessions, and to a few other Health 2.0 moments related to innovation and caregiving.
What I was most excited about: Kaiser Permanente’s exhibit on Imagining Care Anywhere. Although KP’s website for this model doesn’t seem aging-specific, the exhibit at Health 2.0 centered around — get this — a Medicare patient who is diagnosed with early dementia.

The exhibit modeled a comprehensive family-centered care plan, which included safety sensors in the home. And there was a whole panel on how employers and health providers can support the patient’s wife, a working caregiver. It was really nice, and I hope to see more similar things at Health 2.0 in the future.

[View the story “Caregiving at Health 2.0” on Storify]