CAST Announces Leadership Transition

David Gehm

Earlier this month, David M. Gehm was named interim international chair of AAHSA’s Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST), replacing Eric Dishman, a CAST co-founder who’s service as the center’s chair started in 2002. Dishman will continue to serve as CAST’s senior fellow in technology innovation.

A long-time AAHSA member, Gehm is president and chief executive office of Lutheran Homes of Michigan and formerly served as CAST’s vice chair. Dishman is a fellow in the Digital Health Group at Intel and serves as that company’s director of product research and innovation.

“Eric’s vision and energetic leadership has put CAST on the right course,” says Gehm. “My job during this interim period will be to make sure that we stay focused and continue to strengthen the CAST message while maintaining the same level of enthusiasm that Eric brought to the organization.”

Dishman’s energy and enthusiasm have been abundantly clear since the day in 2002 when mid-level managers of large and small technology companies, university researchers and forward-thinking providers first gathered at AAHSA to explore technology’s untapped potential to improve the lives of older people. The energy created during that workshop led AAHSA President and CEO Larry Minnix to offer the group – which later became known as CAST – a permanent home at AAHSA.

Not one to think small, Dishman says that he’s always believed that CAST could play an important role in starting a revolution that transformed the nation’s health care system from one centered around hospitals and institutions to one focused on empowered health care consumers and their families. That switch from “mainframe” to “personal” health care is particularly needed today as providers gear up to serve an expanding older population with a dwindling workforce, says Dishman. And, he says, AAHSA members are in a perfect position to lead the revolution.

“AAHSA has already done a great deal to get people to re-imagine long-term care as a continuum of care,” says Dishman. “Now that continuum has to shift even more broadly into the individual homes of older people. We need to start asking how the AAHSA community can use technology to deliver virtual assisted living, virtual independent living and maybe even virtual skilled nursing some day.”

Dishman and Gehm agree that CAST has taken the first steps in sparking this revolution by educating various stakeholders about independent living technologies and giving policy makers a new perspective on long-term care. For the first time, they say, policy makers are including CAST, AAHSA and long-term care issues in many discussions about health care reform. Most recently, CAST succeeded in convincing lawmakers to incorporate long-term care in the definition of health care that was included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

While pleased with the progress to date, Dishman says he wants more. He’s disappointed, for example, that there aren’t more proven and interoperable independent living technologies available for purchase by long-term care providers and individual consumers. He’s also disappointed that the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are not investing more heavily in research that could prove the value of these technologies. Finally, Dishman says he’d like to see researchers testing aging services technologies in 10,000 homes nationwide.

Dishman remains confident that the “conditions are right for achieving some of these more audacious goals.” He and Gehm plan to continue working together to achieve those goals during what both leaders call “CAST’s second wave.”

“We will continue to raise the level of discourse and awareness about these technologies so we can help shape public policy,” says Gehm. “In addition, the research component of CAST will be vital in the next few years as we improve our ability to tell providers and caregivers how you use specific technologies for the best outcome. And, finally, CAST will play an important role in challenging providers to move forward as innovators who are ready to reach out to their communities in new and different ways.”