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About the project
As New Brunswick’s population ages, more older adults prefer to age in place at home. This can lead to risks such as loneliness, social disconnection, and a lack of the person-centred care that older adults require as they age.
Collaboration between older adults’ informal and formal caregivers may become challenging, leading to gaps in preventative care and social supports in the community. Older adults’ healthcare needs may also become more complex as they age, and their informal caregivers may lack the support and information they need to provide the desired level of care.
Providing older adults and their caregivers with the care planning and digital health connectivity required to medically manage their health and age in place at home could help reduce emergency room visits and hospitalizations while increasing older adults’ connections with their friends, family members, and informal caregivers. The program applied a 24/7 virtual healthcare management tool, known as a Virtual Care Platform, to explore whether this innovation equips New Brunswick older adults to age in place at home.
- The platform used real-time data in the homes of aging New Brunswickers to conduct remote assessment, monitoring, planning, implementation, and evaluation of care needs and supports.
- Informal caregivers (including spouses) were linked with formal caregivers (including nurses, support physicians, and community agencies) to collate health data and understand whether the platform informs, medically manages, and supports older adults with responsive quality care in the home.
Virtual Care Platforms were provided to 58 older adults (40 women, 18 men) in New Brunswick who were identified as at-risk for hospitalization or rehospitalization. Data was also collected from 4 of the older adult participants' informal caregivers.
Conclusions and lessons learned
- Older adults provided with a Virtual Care Platform used it reliably to help with self-monitoring and engage with informal care providers, friends, and family.
- Virtual Care Platforms must be turn-key (i.e. internet-connected, including mobile cell and/or independent Wi-Fi routers) and compatible with external health monitoring devices (e.g., blood pressure cuffs, accelerometers, or glucose monitors).
- Direct feedback and/or partnership from healthcare policy- and decision-makers at all stages of a pilot project may support the adaptability, sustainability, and suitability of the intervention to address current healthcare needs.
Recommendations
- Conduct further research with a larger group of older adults and informal caregivers to assess:
- The potential for scale-up of the virtual care technology; and
- The group of older adult users that the technology benefits most (e.g., older adults with early dementia, cognitive impairment, or multiple chronic diseases that require self-monitoring).
- Explore options for the optimal “first adopters” of the technology (e.g., implementing the technology as part of extramural care or home care services with a defined number of users and care managers).
To learn more read the complete project findings (PDF 144 KB)