AgeTech

Go forth and network this fall. Especially for startups, but useful for long-time members of the field, going to events can reveal contacts that you may need or initiatives that you did not know existed. Over next few months, there are a number of events around the country that are worth attending if schedules permit and interest areas match. Useful, besides sessions themselves, are exhibit areas where vendors offer new and existing solutions for the target audiences of the attendees.  For those who cannot attend, check the exhibit hall online after the event if the organizers make that feature available.  Here are five events upcoming – the information provided from the websites of the organizers:

​Consider CMS Five Star Rating system and how it ‘serves’ families.  Rant on.  No doubt you know someone who was baffled at how a terrible nursing home gets a 4 or 5 star rating from CMS’s Five Star Rating System, while a good one can appear to have a lower rating, applied from an inspection before management overhaul several years earlier.  Why, you ask? Indeed.  Others have asked as well – noting the obvious missing link, family satisfaction with the nursing home, including dealing with the staff. For starters. Retiring outdated information, next. 

It’s 2019 and in full sprint to the year-end finish. Soon you will launch a boomer/senior, home health tech product or service, or maybe a caregiver advisory service.  As your company gets ready to travel into battle or a booth this fall with the sound of lively pitches all around, it is time to for you to revisit this guidance. Perhaps sometime 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. First read existing content and research reports on your particular market segment.  Look over this updated checklist that continues to hold true – with updated links and references. If necessary, refine tactics:

September always seems like a short month.  Not just because of the calendar, but because of the pace of return to California dreamer and tech breathless launches and device announcements, Facebook’s 50 million user data breach – the usual.  Interestingly, healthcare data breaches are largely caused by insiders and cost $400+ per user data record breached.  What Facebook’s breach will cost consumers – no one knows yet, but with that volume, it can’t be good news for users.  Here are four blog posts from September 2018:

Vacations and out of office messages – it must have been August.  Some have said that there is no point in attempting a business meeting, even online, for August. Perhaps you were one of the 5 million visitors to Cape Cod, roaming the hillside vineyards in California or attending an antique car auction on the coast of Maine.  Having managed to pull off two of those three in the same month, it’s not that crazy. But there were issues, disruptions and sizable opportunities worth noting in August, the biggest one was Best Buy's purchase of GreatCall, just six weeks after Amazon acquired PillPack, the latest big company acquisition -- part of a to-be-continued series important to families and providers of care to seniors. Here are the blog posts from the month:

Investors continue to salivate over health tech.  Rant on.   So the first half of 2018 saw $3.4 billion invested in Digital Health (which means whatever you want it to mean.) And even when investments or company roll-ups are specifically about the Medicare population – frothy writers cannot bring themselves to use clear wording. So Optum acquires DaVita Medical Group and Humana acquires Kindred Healthcare. Gee, what do they do? Yes that is vertical integration in the continuum of care – specifically for health services to elderly Medicare recipients.  And the $146 million that went into PointClickCare – that is software for long-term post-acute care (LTPAC), another euphemism for what it really is – care of the elderly, generally in nursing homes.

Voice First technology – triaging the healthcare opportunity.  This week’s Voice of Healthcare Summit in Boston offered up some intriguing attempts to create new Voice First interfaces that inform patients, streamline work, and demonstrate potential (like Answers by Cigna) in versions 2, 3 and beyond.  One of the most intriguing presentations – KidsMD – a Boston Children’s Hospital ‘accelerator’ initiative begun in 2016 and is winning over the staff.  The organization is clearly committed to using Voice First interfaces for patients, for internal questions (“Who is the Charge Nurse on 7 South?”), for hands-free operating room checklists, for post-discharge guidance and for home health (100,000 interactions to date).  They’ve added a skill called AskICU that highlights the potential for ‘hands free, eyes free’ questions that have easy (but difficult to find) answers, like available beds on a floor, or detailed answers like “Medication dosage details from the Code Cart”.   The other hospitals in Boston are well aware of the innovation at Children’s, but other than experiments (like one at Beth Israel Deaconess), nothing of the scope of KidsMD has materialized.  In other blog posts from July: