Home Health & Hospice Week

Study examines barriers to in-home health monitoring.

If you want to make the most of technology to improve clinical outcomes and reap financial benefits, you’ll have to figure out a way to overcome a major obstacle--your patients’ objections.

About 45 million Americans aged 60 or older may not be able to take advantage of recent improvements in home care due to their lack of familiarity with cutting-edge technology, claims a recent report from the New Millennium Research Council.

More and more Americans will need to live with chronic-care conditions as medical advances allow people to live longer, the report predicts. Given that prospective reality, telemedicine assumes a new importance, as it would allow health care providers to monitor seniors’ conditions in the comfort of their own home.

Resistance: The current population of seniors, however, opposes this intrusion of technology. “The U.S.’s senior and baby boomer populations are not currently receptive to in-home health monitoring,” a report by Parks Associates finds.

Reason: Seniors might not welcome the medical technology because they don’t understand its potential benefits, Mark Carpenter, director of the American Association of Retired Persons’ Web Strategy and Operations, says in a statement.

“Older adults also often find little of interest to convince them of the value of making the change, and very frequently, poor design makes technology products very hard to use,” Carpenter explains.

“There may or may not be actual ability to access the technology … and learning new skills can be difficult,” Carpenter says. Reassure Patients Who Have These Fears Still, these difficulties remain largely psychological barriers, the NMRC report holds. The report cites research that suggests seniors may be uncomfortable with technology because they feel it could:

• Eliminate the meaningful social interaction that distinguishes face-to-face care;
• Create an awkward role reversal with their adult children;
• Lead to a loss of privacy; or
• show their inability to learn something new.

For all of these reasons, “older adults tend to be indifferent in closing the generational gap in terms of new technology usage,” according to the NMRC report.

Tide will turn: Fortunately, the incoming baby boomer generation, currently aged 38 to 59, appears more technologically savvy. That group will likely benefit from the recent and rapid advances in health care technology.

Note: The NMRC report is online at http://newmillenniumresearch.org/archive/Telemedicine_Report_022607.pdf.