Reimagining Collaboration In Senior Care: A Technology Driven Approach

In the midst of the perfect storm in senior care—complex patients, high expectations, tight budgets and limited infrastructure—the need for effective collaboration is more critical than ever. 

That collaboration must take place not only between providers and patients but also between multiple providers and patient family members. Senior care providers are increasingly recognizing that they can no longer be successful by simply operating within the four walls of their facility or focusing simply on reactive rather than preventative care. At the same time, their potential market is rapidly expanding: by the end of this decade, more than one in five Americans will be age 65 or older.

As senior care continues to undergo a digital transformation, forward-thinking providers are increasingly realizing that successful collaborations today require them to embrace technology. Even so, companies within the healthcare industry tend to lag their peers in travel or retail when it comes to digitalization.

The type of technology that senior care providers are putting in place matters. To truly optimize the care that they give to their patients, the tech tools that they use must center care around the patient with all stakeholders able to access relevant patient data. In addition to medical providers, other parties that might want or need access include family members, social workers, or therapists. 

The key is moving from coordination—in which the focus is where a patient is physically—to collaboration—which focuses instead on how a patient is doing and how care providers can help them do better. The best practice now is to take a more holistic approach, leveraging data, artificial intelligence and help patients take a proactive approach to their own care rather than simply treating chronic or episodic events.  

Such collaboration takes many forms. It includes proactively sharing data around transitions in and out of a facility, participating in a network that shares patient history and using messaging platforms or care coordination tools to engage with family members or outside doctors. However, the common thread in such collaboration is interoperability.

Care coordination networks

In order to provide the best outcomes to patients, care providers today must use smart, interoperable systems and participate in a care coordination network that allow care providers to access information as efficiently as possible. A nurse practitioner, for example, who works with patients at a dozen different skilled nursing facilities should be able to quickly see, understand and survey the entire population under their care rather than having to log int to 12 different platforms. 

The more that technology can eliminate unnecessary wasteful steps–whether by enabling better dictation tools or generating automatic notes summaries–the more time doctors, nurses and others can spend talking to or caring for patients. 

Collaborative technology can also enable people to stay out of healthcare facilities entirely, an increasingly important goal as more older Americans choose to age at home. Connected medical devices that deliver real-time data to a patient hub monitored by AI can keep a patient’s care team informed of their daily progress with fewer in-person appointments. One study estimated that up to $265 billion worth of care services for Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage patients could move from traditional facilities to their home—without any decrease in the quality of care. 

AI can also help by surfacing data about specific patients or populations that medical providers can use to inform the care that they provide. A simple example is making sure that a patient admitted with certain comorbidities will receive a proven care pathway tailored for their case.

On a more macro level, AI might surface data that shows that readmissions typically spike on Mondays because the regular staff is not in a building on the weekends. The takeaway for that facility might be to have virtual health physicians engage with those patients on a Saturday morning, as opposed to waiting until Monday, which can result in a return trip to the hospital.

In both cases, senior care facilities can use data to make changes to their processes in ways that benefit the patient. Looking ahead, as technology continues to improve, so will the ways in which senior care facilities can use it to provide smarter, more personalized care for their patients.