So you want to launch a boomer/senior, home health tech product or service. As your new company get ready to travel into battle at mHealth, CES, and all those 2015 launch events to-be-named-later, it is time to for you to revisit this guidance.Perhaps some time soon, your new or existing company will officially launch a new product or service, or perhaps a long-awaited, over-described and much-anticipated offering will finally ship. Here is a checklist that continues to hold true – with a few links that are merely examples:
A ‘seismic shift’ or real slow crawl? In a recent article in Senior Housing News, the article opined that sensor based home monitoring was going to become widespread and ubiquitous over the next few years in senior housing organizations. But there is no evidence that would support that premise unless you were interviewing technology vendors, of course, which the author was. In this case the vendor was Care Innovations, a spinoff from Intel and GE that was formed two years ago. In fact, evidence to the contrary, telehealth/remote patient monitoring (assuming that included any sensor-based technology) was last on the investment priority list for this year among CFOs surveyed within LeadingAge senior housing organizations.
The fork buzz at CES versus the real world of aging and older adults. I’m staring at and trying to make sense of two documents -- one is the CES list of tech offerings that target older adults and Digital health. The second is a conference agenda of an event sponsored by the Erickson School of the University of Maryland called Look Who’s Aging – comprised of business execs and industry leaders for the market of nursing homes, assisted living and related services. While both of these events were really about the world of consumers and what they want, what I saw is more than a ‘digital divide’ – gargantuan gulf might be more appropriate. Exhibit A: the buzzing fork was there to remind you that you are eating too fast and too much. Right. But other than the fork, in the end, each of these events would benefit from a few bridges across that gulf.
Social security – no more paper checks – unless. So on March 1, 2013, all social security checks are to be direct deposited to a bank account or to a debit card. That is, all except for those aged 90 and older who qualify for a hardship waiver. Says Treasury about waivers: it would have to be "extreme, rare circumstances." Really? Too bad, according to the article, these waivers are not well publicized on the government's website. But there are nearly 2 million people age 90+. If you place the 90+ age group inside the 85+ population, we’re now talking about nearly 6 million people. Most of the discussion of a swelling oldest demographic centers on Social Security running out of money in by some date certain (the people who do these projections are always certain.)
