25% of elderly Americans sacrifice their basic needs to afford healthcare costs. Even with these sacrifices, 50 million American adults aged 50 and older are at risk for illness progression—and even death—because costs are still too high.
The situation is getting even worse as inflation strains the United States economy. The cost of basic needs, healthcare, and senior care facilities are rising, but social security checks remain stagnant.
By helping your seniors embrace technological advances, you can help reduce the burden of healthcare costs.
Reducing healthcare costs: Technology’s role
A few decades ago, seniors were reliant solely on in-person healthcare, which gets pricey very quickly. Fortunately, this is no longer the case due to recent advancements in healthcare technology. Patients can now more effectively manage their health issues virtually, at a fraction of the price of in-person care.
Seniors pay an average of $7,030 per year on healthcare, which is 13% of their total spending. On top of nursing home costs, these fees are often very challenging for seniors to handle, even when they have Medicare.
Healthcare technologies in the market help seniors spend less on healthcare—for example, Ōmcare Home Health Hub only costs $9 per month—because they provide a solution that reduces the need for healthcare employees day-to-day. Longterm, these technologies reduce costly hospitalizations.
How to help seniors reduce healthcare costs
There are three main alternatives to in-person healthcare: virtual care, remote patient monitoring, and medication management.
Virtual care
Virtual care allows your seniors to speak with their physician, receive diagnoses, and learn about their treatment plans—all from inside your facility. A medical care professional provides services through video chats, voice calls, or text messages.
With virtual care, patients get the care they need, at a far lower cost. The reduction in cost is why many people choose to use virtual care: a RAND study found that “people who preferred video visits were more sensitive to out-of-pocket costs than those who preferred in-person visits.”
Despite the reduction in costs, quality of care remains the same. The RAND study found that only 2% of those who had a video visit were unwilling to do so again. That means patients are content and happy with the outcome of virtual care. To make virtual appointments as effective as possible, have an employee accompany your seniors, while taking detailed notes.
Remote patient monitoring
Virtual care is increasingly effective when paired with remote patient monitoring. Using remote patient monitoring, healthcare providers can monitor and manage a senior’s chronic conditions. When any issues arise, they can see the data. They can spot the issue and deliver virtual care.
By monitoring vitals 24/7, remote patient monitoring:
- Reduces and shortens hospitalizations
- Decreases emergency room visits
- Prevents long-term health complications
- Reduces risk of getting infected with COVID-19 and other illness
When your seniors are healthier and dealing with less complications, they face fewer healthcare costs. Remote patient monitoring also helps your facility and your seniors cut any travel costs.
Medication management
A key aspect of managing chronic conditions is medication adherence. Unfortunately, seniors are likely to forget to take and refill their medications—leading to $100 billion in preventable medical costs every year.
Why does medication nonadherence cost so much? The answer is that when seniors aren’t properly taking their medicine, they’re 25% more likely to be hospitalized. That leads to a major hike in emergency healthcare costs.
To avoid hospitalizations, use healthcare technologies that were created specifically to help seniors manage their medicine. These include:
- Automatic pill deliveries
- Pre-sorted pill packages dispensed at the right time, in the right dose
- Text message, email, or call reminders
- Automatic refills
- Adherence tracking
Medication adherence technologies help seniors stay on track of their proper dosage schedules, leading to less health complications and less costs.
Boosting healthcare tech adoption
No matter what healthcare technology you’re introducing to your facility, follow these tips to improve adoption among your seniors:
- Find simple, intuitive technologies that are easy to use, with few, well-marked buttons.
- Make sure the technology is accessible for seniors, with features like larger text sizes and speech-activation.
- Provide well-written, easy-to-follow instructions.
- Offer extra in-person technology coaching.
- Assure seniors that their data is safe—only 1 in 10 seniors feel confident that their interactions with healthcare tech will be kept private. Address these privacy concerns.
- Educate seniors on how the technology will help them, improve their health outcomes, and reduce their costs.
And finally, make sure your technological options are actually affordable to your seniors. One way to increase affordability is finding a technology that offers many key features in one.
Ōmcare brings it all together, for less than $10 a month
If you’re looking for an all-in-one healthcare solution that allows for virtual care and medication adherence, consider the Ōmcare Home Health Hub. The technology:
- Stores up to a 30-day supply of multi-dose pouched medication
- Provides a video portal for medication adherence tracking
- Connects patients with providers virtually
Our 3-month pilot showed that the Ōmcare Home Health Hub drove a 98% dose-level adherence rate. At the end of the pilot, all 780 participants strongly agreed that Ōmcare helps them remember to take their medications.
Drive positive health outcomes for your seniors and help them cut their healthcare costs by partnering with Ōmcare for just $9.99 a month per patient. Learn more today.