“Health and Well-Being in the Home” is a home healthcare study sponsored by Royal Phillips Electronics that looks at how advanced home healthcare solutions could mitigate the challenges and constraints facing healthcare worldwide.
Advances in home health care products and services are attractive, promising, and, perhaps, even necessary solutions to mitigate the current pressure on the health care system while improving the patients’ well-being beyond the physiological parameters of disease control. These innovations allow the shifting of care from institutional and professional settings to patients’ homes and enable patients to self-manage their conditions, assisted by formal or informal caregivers as needed.
Home health care and self-management devices and services span a broad spectrum. Depending on the interpretation of the terminology, they can include everything from mobility support tools to basic diagnostic and therapeutic tools, such as glucose meters, to telemedicine solutions and care delivered by home health care professionals. For our purposes here, we focus on home health care technologies and solutions and do not address durable medical equipment (e.g., walkers), supplies (e.g., wound care products), or professional services, such as in-person home care.
Technological advances have pushed the frontier of care management into the home setting, and today’s tools go well beyond mere monitoring and narrow functionalities; they allow the integration of monitoring and therapeutic systems, provide educational content, and enable communication and data flow between the patient and professional health care providers. Such solutions have the potential to not only support current care delivery but also fundamentally change the model to a more efficient and patient-centered one. They also make it easier for patients to age in place, if they prefer, and avoid institutionalization.
Click here to read the full report.
Originally posted: 12/28/10 by aip@Home Editor
AIPatHome.com Advisor Louis Tenenbaum wrote us about a report he helped prepare: “Aging in Place 2.0 Rethinking Solutions to the Homecare Challenge” released earlier this month by MetLife’s Mature Market Institute. According to the report communities, government and the public and private sectors will need to make sweeping changes to accommodate older Americans’ desire to remain in their homes.
Multiple studies have shown that most Americans over 45 wish to remain in their own homes even when assistance will be needed. To achieve this their research indicated that in coming years adjustments will need to include homes in which residential design, health care services and new monitoring technologies are combined with comprehensive community care services to form a dynamic and efficient home health management system. (hmmmmm, sound familiar…. “AIPatHome: make your home livable, longer, through universal design & technology.”)
Referred to as AiP2.0, this new Aging in Place blueprint envisions a more efficient use of available resources and an enhanced and better coordinated service delivery mechanisms.
“Wherever older individuals live, whether in their own homes or in a care facility, the setting may be inefficient for many people, since a person’s need for care fluctuates as medical conditions come and go, often resulting in the need to move back and forth between multiple care settings,” said Sandra Timmermann, Ed.D., director of the MetLife Mature Market Institute. “A new integration of care services, home design and technology, as outlined in AiP2.0, will likely lead to less stress for older adults and their caregivers, supporting a better quality of life for all of them.”
According to the institute there are 5 steps to Aip2.0:
- Homes prepared for Aging in Place through individual investment, subsidies and incentives
- Investment in businesses that will connect market sectors to improved service delivery
- Development of care management, social interaction, wellness and transportation systems,
- Care management designed to dispatch services when needed,
- Care delivery models to make better individuals in the community
Click here to read the full report.
Originally posted: 09/19/10 by aip@Home Editor
For Eddie Beardsmore, age 62, and a chronic pulmonary disease (COPD) sufferer the beeping black box on his hall table has changed his life. Less trips to the hospital, better understanding and management of his condition. He is participating in a telehealth trial run by the NHS with nearly 6,000 patients reports success with patients and medical providers. Full results are expected in the spring.
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Originally posted: 09/14/10 by aip@Home Editor
What’s Holding Back Telehealthcare?
By Paul Bond, Emergency Nursing Today
Like it or not, electronic administration of healthcare is here – and it’s here to stay.
Why hasn’t the behemoth that is supposedly our economy’s downfall gone virtual for more of what it can do?
The answer is quite simple: money. It’s not a lack of desire on the part of physicians or nurses or even administrators to adopt the technology. It’s not about data security. It’s about payment for services. That’s right. It’s the reimbursement for such adoption that seems to be holding back the floodgates (imagine that!).
Let’s look at the healthcare system in Western PA, UPMC. They utilize telehealth in 15 different hospitals and in 13 different specialties. Yet, many other hospitals in the area don’t even use HALF of that! Why? The insurance companies don’t feel telehealth has been proven as a cost saving method yet. And they base this on what? Their opinion.
Many studies have been done on the measuring the effectiveness of telemedicine and how it can indeed save money and benefit patient care. The Veteran’s Administration already uses it for 35,000 of its patients. And now, California has moved ahead with an initiative to connect 800 facilities statewide for the purpose of saving money and sharing resources to provide health care services.
I wonder when the holders of the purse strings will open their eyes and shell out the needed funds to make this happen nationwide? I also wonder what it will take to make that happen?