Baby boomers are becoming seniors and retirees. Telemedicine providers plan to take full advantage of the need of these new seniors to stay independent and unencumbered. As telehealth and mHealth technology grows, remote patient monitoring options are becoming more robust.
Providers continue to develop innovations when it comes to providing care for seniors. This includes many developers taking advantage of mobile technology to add another element or dimension to telemedicine.
A good example of this comes from developers of mobile personal emergency response services, or mPERS. These applications would sit and wait for a problem to happen, and for someone to push a button. Software developers are actively working to improve these applications by making them full, real-time health monitoring devices and software.
One such developer, MobileHelp, intends to make their offerings more social in nature. The goal is to give baby boomers the ability to have a hub for all their wellness activities, not just an emergency device.
Large and small companies are pushing, or developing, telemedicine platforms and connectivity solutions. There’s various players in telemedicine, but they’re not all moving in the same direction. For example, GreatCall aims to bring health monitoring into every aspect of the home.
In this way, daily living will generate a constant data stream of habits and movements that tie into health. This type of passive monitoring can pick out trends and spikes. This can help seniors and their caregivers to fine-tune their diets, activities, and other aspects of daily living.
The main goal of all these innovations and plans is to make value-based care the norm. This type of care has a focus on the patient. It removes the fee-based method of always doing more to increase profits, as in more tests, more screenings, more doctor visits just to talk, etc.
Better, more focused care, can lead to fewer doctor visits and lower costs. For the more independent baby boomers, this approach, coupled with technology they’re familiar with, will create a new age of home-based care.