The Pandemic Is Almost in the Rear-View Mirror, What’s Next For Tech in Senior Living?
What comes to mind when you think of tech for senior living? Do your thoughts include robots roaming the halls and interacting with residents, or VR headsets for empathy training? Technology for senior living today is more diverse than ever before and solves various challenges for both residents and staff. The covid-19 pandemic has accelerated tech adoption for individual older consumers, but also for senior living. What has changed and what’s ahead?
A very short brief on the history of senior living
The concept of “old age homes” has been around for centuries, but it has changed throughout the years. In the past, old people who went into nursing homes didn’t necessarily need care. It was a place where people would go if they had nowhere else to live or family to provide them with food and shelter. It wasn’t until the 20th century that governments began instituting social welfare programs that provided income and funded services for older people who were no longer able to work. Government funding (and regulation) gave rise to contemporary “old age homes” – senior living, CCRCs and nursing homes. In fact, the first recognized assisted living facility in the US only opened in the 80s!
Resident engagement – the holy grail of senior living
The average age at which someone moves into a senior living community has increased from 78 to 83 in the past decade, and most senior living residents today are over the age of 85 (the “oldest-old”). The average resident is an 87 year old woman who requires assistance with 2-3 activities of daily living. However there’s more to senior living than just board and care. Researchers that have interviewed older adults in an effort to define quality of life in later years, found that “it is important for their wellbeing to ‘keep busy’, ‘keep active’ and ‘have something to do’ in order to avoid boredom and sink into apathy”. You will have a hard time finding a senior living community that doesn’t have an activity director on staff. In large communities, there are so many activities that residents can participate in them from the time they get up in the morning until it’s time for dinner (if not after).
As time progresses, the needs and wants of existing residents change, and there’s also a change in expectations from potential future residents. When baby boomers, who are part of the generation that invented personal computers, smartphones, and the internet, inquire about a community for their parents or themselves, they might present new demands – like high speed internet throughout the community.
Chip Burns, CIO of Sun Health Communities, said in an interview to HealthTech Magazine in 2019 that “These new seniors want to know that we are on top of technology — even if they’re not… Their families want to know that mom and dad are going to a place where they will not only have the technology themselves but the family can keep in touch too.”
How Covid-19 accelerated tech adoption
Facilities have to keep up – making their 80+ year old residents (and their families) happy while remaining a relevant future living option in the eyes of today’s 65+ year olds. This isn’t easy. A basic requirement to making sure your community is ready to meet the needs of existing and future residents, is to make sure you have the right wireless internet infrastructure to support your residents and all of their bandwidth devouring devices. Long gone are the days when internet was perceived as an amenity. Today, it’s a utility.
I don’t believe there’s any senior living community, in any OECD country, that did not want to upgrade their internet infrastructure to a 21st century standard. However, senior living communities often operate with tight budgets, and a large investment in infrastructure that was perceived as an amenity in the past, could have easily been postponed until next year, over, and over and over again.
The covid-19 pandemic accelerated existing trends in many ways. Pre-pandemic, a new resident might have been willing to accept not having high speed wireless internet in their room or apartment. Today, that is no longer the case. But the internet is only the beginning, its required infrastructure in 2021. What else can senior living communities do, to meet the needs of residents and staff with technology?
Solutions that are available today and were in use during Covid-19
During normal times, when senior living communities adopt new technologies, they do so with the purpose of benefiting residents and staff and with the hopes that these solutions will present positive ROI in the shape of keeping occupancy high and staff turnover low. Whatever your goals are, there might be a tech-enabled solution out there that could help you reach them. During the covid-19 pandemic, many of the existing solutions saw a steep increase in demand, and agile vendors released new features to existing products, to tackle new, pandemic-related challenges. The most pressing needs revolved around maintaining physical and emotional well-being of residents, during these difficult times.
Keeping residents active, connected and engaged
Resident engagement platforms like iN2L were already quite common when the pandemic hit, and were a real lifesaver when residents in senior living couldn’t socialize with each other or have family visits. Activity directors in many communities had those readily available and were able to keep residents happily engaged despite the constraints. Some of those platforms even offered fitness programs, which was incredibly important.
Connecting residents with family during lockdowns
While many communities banned visits from outsiders altogether for about a year, in order to keep residents safe, it was clear from the get-go that this is detrimental to residents’ emotional well-being. We’ve all seen pictures of family members meeting older loved ones when they’re on opposite sides of a window. A creative solution to allow touching was the “hugging wall” – which allowed people to hug while being separated by a clear plastic sheet. Some residents, however, did not meet with family members for the better part of a year, and used video calls to stay connected, celebrating birthdays and holidays on Zoom or Facetime. Staff members, which weren’t necessarily well versed in operating video calls themselves, were expected to assist residents with accepting and initiating video calls, which added to the workload.
Voice-activated devices like the Amazon Echo promised to help lighten the load, and allow residents to connect with family without direct involvement from the staff. K4Connect and Amazon deployed thousands of Amazon Echo devices in senior living communities across America for this purpose.
Bringing healthcare in rather than sending residents out
Telehealth solutions, while already in place in some communities prior to the pandemic, weren’t the go-to-option, but adoption and expansion of those services inside senior living was made easier when regulators and insurers loosened up restrictions. Telehealth solutions were used to make sure residents could continue to receive healthcare, while reducing unnecessary visits to hospitals and clinics, which could have put their health at risk.
Brian Geyser, Maplewood’s chief clinical officer, commented on this in a Senior Housing News (SHN) article, saying that “what we had to do was quickly adapt and ramp up what was a very spotty, scattered telehealth program to become more sophisticated and more voluminous in terms of the number of telehealth visits.” What platforms did communities like Maplewood use for telehealth visits? They deployed off-the-shelf tablets, telepresence robots and other screen-based solutions to meet residents’ telehealth needs.
What staff at senior living soon discovered, was that residents required assistance in operating these devices. Existing staff had trouble keeping up with all the tech-support requests, so a new position was born – the tech concierge. According to SHN, “This is a new job function hired to support the community’s resident-facing technology needs and serve as an enabler of all of the different devices and platforms senior residents now use.”
Stopping the spread of the virus
There was also the need for contact tracing. Wearable makers like CarePredict’s, who’s wearable was already in use by many communities, quickly released contact tracing features that allowed communities to isolate anyone who came into contact with an infected resident or staff member, and stop the spread of the covid-19 virus in the community.
Where do we go from here?
One example for innovative thinking and strategising comes from Formation Capital. Their founder, Arnold Whitman, recently told SNH that their new strategy is to “break down the walls of senior living”, and gradually shift from a real-estate-only business, to an organization that is also able to offer services to older adults who aren’t residents. These models already exist in their high touch form, and now there’s a software solution that enables senior living to do that at scale. This is just one example for the way tech can align with the vision of innovative senior living leaders. There are plenty more, and despite the fact that many of the challenges in senior living are common, there isn’t usually a one-size-fits-all solution. Each community has to find which of the existing solutions is the best fit for them.
One thing that is true for everyone, is that now is the time to invest in infrastructure. Get high-speed wireless internet throughout the community, appoint or hire a “tech concierge”. Figure out, which of the existing services can be enhanced by tech-enabled solutions? What needs do residents and staff have that aren’t being met? How to make the community appealing to a new generation of potential residents? How to prepare for the next pandemic? Are there any solutions that can help solve staffing challenges?
With the vaccine rollout underway, communities have reopened in many countries and occupancy levels are picking up. Vaccinated residents are no longer considered “high risk”, and senior living providers can breathe a sigh of relief. However, this is not the time to get complacent. This is a time to look ahead and plan for the future.
If you’re interested in learning more about age tech solutions and how you too can source, validate, and implement the right solutions for your residents and your community, sign up for the Age Tech Academy!
Any thoughts or comments on this? Feel free to direct-message me using the contact page. You can follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter or subscribe to my YouTube channel!