If it hasn’t been said before, the home health care industry is expand day by day. With more and more baby boomers reaching older ages with higher mortality rates, the need for home health care providers has matched that. With that growth, and the inert need to be home based versus moving to a facility had created challenges when it comes to technology in home health care. How much is too much, when is an alternate facility become paramount versus living independent? None of these questions can be answered today, but there a re a few advances worth looking at.
Technology in Home Health Care
As information technology grows and expands, more and more medical devices become available for home use, especially in the critical care arena. Many formerly cared for critical care cases can now be handles in home due to technological breakthroughs. Some new breakthrough technologies are: smart inhalers-which read the air in a room to look for pollutants in a room that trigger asthma attacks. Thus, being preemptive to the patient. There are also smart phone technologies that offer some test to be administered by the patient themselves and then transmitted to their own personal doctor or nurse for evaluation. The most important evolution in technology for the aide in home health, is the innovation of home sensory devices that assist in monitoring patients in areas previously monitored by caretakers on a visit.
With technologies that are even more socially prone (skype for instance) it is becoming easier and more cost effective (versus admitting and re-admitting) for patients to virtually see their physician on a regular basis. The home installed technology gets the read outs, sends them to the doctor, patient connects to office to review diagnoses, prescriptions shipped straight to the home…retirement and the care that goes with it are changing…almost daily.