Eric Dishman at hearing on National Broadband Plan
On April 22, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging held a hearing entitled, The National Broadband Plan and Bringing Health Care Technology Home.
The hearing featured testimony from Eric Dishman, global director of health innovation and policy at Intel Digital Health Group, and a senior fellow at AAHSA’s Center for Aging Services Technologies (CAST) in Washington, D.C.
Dishman said that he, like nearly 50 million other family caregivers in America, is living the need for innovative solutions to help aging adults stay healthy and happy at the place they call home.
According to Dishman, there are too many barriers and too little national attention to building aging-in-place inventions, infrastructures and industries that all Americans will eventually utilize. His testimony focused on answering three vital questions:
- What are we doing as a nation to prepare for global aging, and how do we make sure investments in fundamental infrastructure like broadband and health information technologies (HIT) are ready to support e-care in the home?
- How are we ensuring that payment reforms and new care coordination incentives at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and private market encourage doctors to care for seniors in their own homes when appropriate?
- How can we accelerate research and commercialization of aging-in-place technologies to let e-care best practices advantage our nation’s families, businesses and overall economy?
“As a social scientist who has run Intel Corporations research and innovation efforts around aging-in-place and e-care for more than a decade, I have seen firsthand that these technologies, when designed intentionally to fit into the home and to connect families with professional providers, can dramatically help with prevention, early detection, behavior change and self-care,” Dishman said in his testimony. “As co-founder of the CAST, I have evaluated many promising aging-in-place solutions being researched in universities and companies that now need to move from laboratories to the lives of seniors and families across the country.”
Dishman explained the importance of making sure no senior is precluded from access to aging-services technologies because of the outdated practices or payment structures inherent in today’s government or private reimbursement systems. “We must make sure our country’s investment in health information technology (HIT) and broadband do not stop at the hospital door but extend to the home and to seniors and their caregivers in the community.”
The committee also heard testimony from Robin Felder, Ph.D., professor of pathology and associate director of clinical chemistry at the University of Virginia School (UVA) of Medicine. Robin, who is a CAST Commissioner and was my boss at UVA, focused on how an expanded broad band infrastructure can result in dramatic cost savings, yet higher quality of health and wellness for the elderly. Felder said that broadband has the potential to reduce the cost of medicine by more than 50 percent, and stimulate economic growth in the medical technology sector.
A study by Felder and his colleagues showed that home-monitoring, which uses the Internet to send and receive data, demonstrated a 36 percent reduction in billable medical procedures and a 78 percent reduction in hospital stays. Moreover, the study showed a 68 percent reduction in the cost of care. The study referenced by Felder was conducted in partnership with AAHSA member Volunteers of America.
“Despite the reduced cost of care, the efficiency of the caregivers increased by over 50%. Thus, monitoring technologies can significantly reduced billable interventions, hospital days and cost-of-care to payers, and has a positive impact on professional caregivers’ efficiency,” Felder told the committee.
It is worthy to note that AAHSA’s own Robyn Stone, Barbara Manard, and myself have provided input to the National Broadband Plan with respect to enabling more services to support the independence and quality of life of seniors wherever they live.
AAHSA and CAST have also recently submitted comments that aim primarily to improve the broadband plan in terms prioritizing Internet traffic for health care delivery to seniors. If you have any questions about the broadband plan, or the hearing, send me an email.
