A Letter to the Presidential Candidates

 

At Ecumen, we see technology as essentially important to helping seniors live independently or to maintain maximum independence in assisted living, memory care or other senior housing communities.Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, wrote about this exact subject last month in an 'open letter to the Presidential candidates' in Fortune Magazine in which he recommended the use of technology to help keep seniors where they want to live. Here’s the excerpt from his letter:

KEEP PARENTS AT HOME. The cost of caring for the elderly is huge and will only grow as our population ages. Of the $440,000 the average American spends on health care in his lifetime, $280,000 will be spent after age 65. Probably 50% of that post-65 outlay goes to assisted-living facilities and nursing homes. So it stands to reason that if there were a way to keep elderly patients in their own homes longer without degrading quality of care we’d have a cheaper and better system.

And we can do just that using technology. I’m talking everyday, low-cost technology the sensors, microchips, small radios you’d find in today’s PCs, in cellphones, and in Bluetooth earpieces. It’s not too difficult to use this stuff as monitoring tools. Not to spy, but to detect trouble. For example, did the patient go outside to get the newspaper or did she wander away? Has the patient taken his meds? The same technology that brings us HBO can watch over the patient and trigger human intervention when needed.

A critical step to make this happen is to have it blessed and reimbursed by the dominant health-care supplier to the aged, Medicare. Candidates, I hope to see a phrase in your inauguration speech that starts like this: 'I will have Medicare define specifications for electronic equipment that allows the average aging citizen to stay home two years longer than today.'

Can we afford all this? Let’s do the math… . the savings achieved by keeping just 10% of the aging population in their homes can amount to $30 billion a year. So, yes, Mr./Ms. Presidential Candidate, we can afford it. Not making these reforms would be the same as burning $30 million a day at the local dump.

Commit to doing these two concrete things now. You will save money. You will improve the lives of millions of citizens. And you will demonstrate to yourself, and to all of us, that we are a country of doers. That is worth the program by itself.