The White House Conference on Aging

Comments

1. Dave Chase says

   July 12, 2015 at 9:21 am

   It’s great this event is taking place but it does make me wonder why it would only take place every 10 years but I digress. If you haven’t already gotten connected with the Green House movement that Dr. Bill Thomas is catalyzing, it’s a great program and I believe Bill is attending the event. Here’s their post about it – http://changingaging.org/blog/the-green-house-project-at-the-white-house-conference-of-aging/.

   As you’ve pointed out with the Home Hacks, there should be a better way to share this info. Perhaps Code for America can be given a grant to make this happen. I’m sure you Rebecca Coelius and their work. I participated last month in a great open innovation event with the COPD Foundation (organized by Novartis). One of the cool things was seeing a diverse group (techies, non techies AND especially patients) come up with “home hacks” — it was one of the best received items. See more at https://www.copdfoundation.org/Crowdshaped/COPD-HomeHacks.aspx.

   I’m certainly a believer in Blue Button but I’d love to see the President and/or Secretary use their bully pulpit to push for Open Notes as the default. The sooner it passes through the 3 stages of truth (ridiculed, violently opposed & accepted as fact), the better off we’ll all be. I love the work that group is doing and have been tracking it for awhile in light of its impact on engagement and outcomes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davechase/2012/10/07/historic-day-in-opening-doctors-notes/.

   I look forward to hearing how the event goes!

   Reply

2. catherine says

   July 12, 2015 at 11:24 am

   Can’t wait to read about this, esp hacks. Just tweeted a wheelchair access hack to you on twitter.

   Reply

3. e-Patient Dave says

   July 12, 2015 at 11:32 am

   First: everything Chase said, yeah.

   Second: above all, please please let’s do everything we can to put our health records in the hands of patients and caregivers. The IOM (now NAM) said back in 2012 that a cornerstone of the health system must be “patient-clinician partnerships” with “empowered, engaged patients,” and as Dr. Danny Sands has long said, “How can patients participate if they can’t see what I see?” (Or, in my wording in Let Patients Help, “People perform better if they’re informed better.” It’s perverse to keep us in the dark and then complain that we’re uninformed.

   Third: I hope everyone who wants to think about the future of aging will look at three urgent things that changed my view in recent years, especially after I turned 65 myself this year:

   1. Consider seriously the implications of Jon White MD’s 2013 post called “65” on the General Surgery News blog, documenting that half of all the humans who’ve ever been 65 are alive today. This is, clearly, unprecedented, so we need to think newly, like the people who created space flight.

   Dr. White validated the idea through one line of fact-checking; I did too with a different approach, which my audiences respond well to:
   – Today we have 3x more humans than at the end of WW II (7+ billion vs 2.3)
   – When Social Security started, median US male life expectancy was 63.5. If that were still true, half my classmates would be dead. Not true by a long shot.
   – Realization: it’s because medicine keeps saving us from dying! (I’m one of those.) As medicine gets better and better we can expect more and more of these.

   2. This is visualized by Pew’s new book Next America, with its orange “animated beehive” graphic showing how our population pyramid is becoming a rectangle. I adapted that into a more dramatic version bit.ly/pewbeehives, which I use in my talks about aging.

   3. Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal is essential reading. Aside from its discussion of the final decline (the “being mortal” aspect), I was surprised to see that non-miraculous interventions can easily prolong our good functioning at-home years:

   People can’t stop the aging of their bodies and minds, but there are ways to make it more manageable and to avert at least some of the worst affects.

   Example:

   Each year about 350,000 Americans fall and break a hip. [Almost a thousand a day!] Of those, 40% end up in a nursing home and 20% never walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. Elderly people without these three risk factors have a 12% chance of falling in a year. Those with all three have almost a 100% chance.”

   So, for instance, simply reviewing the med list to see if any are not really needed – in light of any hazardous interactions – can help avert disaster.

   As you know, a great example is the work of Eric Dishman and others at Intel to support safe aging at home, e.g. with smart carpets that can detect that feet are starting to shuffle. (See his talk at the first TEDMED, 2009.)

   We perform better when we’re informed better. Liberate our data. Please.

   Reply

   • e-Patient Dave says

     July 12, 2015 at 11:46 am

     As a short summary of the fall issue (and why staying home is so helpful), please take 90 seconds to watch this segment about one elder in Dishman’s TEDMED talk, starting here.

     Reply

4. Lisa Gualtieri says

   July 12, 2015 at 2:55 pm

   The conference sounds great, and best of luck with your presentation. I’d love to hear if aging in place is one of the topics covered. I am fascinated by how technology can be designed, redesigned, or repurposed to provide alerts and reminders. For example, the data available from the use of Fitbit, Withings, and other products can be used by adult children, caregivers, and clinicians to indicate when a person is not following daily routines. (This is one of the areas I am currently working on – non-intrusive monitoring while encouraging small increments in fitness using wearable activity trackers that are rarely used by or marketed to seniors).

   Reply

5. wendy sue swanson says

   July 13, 2015 at 12:36 am

   This is exciting. It’s been a remarkable transition (with technology, in particular) this last decade — the ability to peek into records (for some), participate in care, learn from peers, and potentially extend life because of it. Supporting my mom as she ages is a huge part of my life and I’m hopeful to learn more and more about how she can navigate the health care space BETTER.

   I so wish I could join the press corp in DC tomorrow and listen in to all of you. Best of luck and thank you for all you’re doing to help us understand how to do this better…

   Reply

6. e-Patient Dave says

   July 13, 2015 at 6:32 am

   One more little mind pop that I’ve become aware of during my own illness and more recently my wife’s knee problems:

   A wheelchair is basically an “elderstroller,” and we’re going to see lots of them around us. But when my granddaughter was born and I saw my daughter’s generation talking about strollers I realized: BOY the wheelchair industry hasn’t learned a think about options and “pimp my ride” from the stroller industry.

   To clear this comment instantly I won’t put this in URLs but look at bobgear. com/ accessories and consider how much of that is available for wheelchairs. Not to mention the baskets above and below that some models have, which wheelchairs don’t.

   From a marketer’s perspective this is predictable if you look at the “Pew beehive” demographic images – the industry hasn’t woken up yet. C’mon, industry! Zillions of us needy / self-loving boomers are waiting for you to suck up to us! If you don’t do it, someone in Europe will!

   Reply

7. Susannah Fox says

   July 13, 2015 at 6:35 am

   Thank you, everyone, for the comments so far! I published this post and then went on an all-day road trip, not getting back home until late last night — and now I’m off to the first event of the day (a panel before a watch party at the Dept of Transportation).

   But that’s the beautiful thing about the internet — and this blog: The conversation is never over. Let’s keep it going with observations & questions.

   For example, here’s a must-read post, by Muriel Gillick, MD:

   Get old? Who me?

   And here’s a link to Catherine’s tweet about her home health hack:

   https://twitter.com/heyyalltennis/status/620251827167227904

   Love it!!

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8. Dave Chase says

   July 13, 2015 at 9:29 am

   ePD – I did a bit of googling to see what’s been done on reinventing the Elderstroller (aka wheelchair). Some amazingly creative ideas at http://www.lovethesepics.com/2012/09/35-wildly-wonderful-wheelchair-design-concepts/ (my personal fav is the one with the flamethrower 🙂 ).

   Some more at http://www.damngeeky.com/2014/04/08/20029/best-wheelchair-innovations-that-bring-freedom-to-paraplegics.html. Google “wheelchair innovations” for more. I’m not sure the status of the market entry of these but one would sure think we’d see more of these. I suspect that we’ll see wounded warriors as early adopters and hopefully that will spread to all ages.

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9. Susannah Fox says

   July 15, 2015 at 6:21 am

   Hi all,

   Thanks again for the great comments heading into the event — an example of how this was a “flipped” conference in a lot of ways. The event itself was just one link in a chain and the online conversation was as important as what happened on stage.

   I created a Storify of the tweets and articles I saw on Monday:
   https://storify.com/SusannahFox/white-house-conference-on-aging

   My colleagues at HHS also created one:
   https://storify.com/HHSGov/2015-white-house-conference-on-aging

   If you watched any of the livestream or online conversation, what were your impressions?

   Reply

10. Leslie Kernisan, MD MPH says

    July 17, 2015 at 1:04 pm

    Thanks Susannah for sparking this conversation about this important event. Agree w all the comments.

    For those who are really interested in aging: a coalition of grantmakers funded the Frameworks Institute to study the way experts and the public view aging. The long-term goal is to help experts be more successful in bringing about the changes we need to support an aging society. Their first report, Gauging Aging, was released earlier this spring, and it is SUPER interesting. Here are some useful links:

    PDF report can be accessed here
    http://www.americangeriatrics.org/about_us/lao/gauging_aging_report

    Webinar discussing the findings
    https://vimeo.com/123903462

    Short video with regular people on the street talking about aging
    https://vimeo.com/119138783

    As you all know, the words we use are important…they shape the narrative, the frames people use, how people feel about an issue, and so forth.

    Lastly, it’s good to see that HHS has created aging.gov. Hope to see many of innovations described here reaching more older people soon.

    Reply

    • Susannah Fox says

      July 18, 2015 at 7:51 am

      Thanks, Leslie! Great resources.

      I’d love for us to keep building this conversation so we can come back to it when we need to renew our ideas, inspiration, commitment to understanding what we face as a country.

      Since I didn’t get to say all that I’d hoped to say during my panel — our moderator chose to go with tweeted questions instead of the prepared ones — I wrote a post for the WHCOA blog:

      The future of aging and technology

      I wrote about data, connection, and invention. Here’s the bit about invention, which is going to be a focus of my time as CTO:

      We are a nation of makers. I believe the U.S. can lead the world in inventing ways for older adults to age in place, with dignity. And the government can play a role in fostering this innovation.
      For example, people living with Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders often develop a hand tremor, which makes it difficult to keep food on a spoon or fork. Liftware, a company in California, has created a set of utensils that counteract a tremor and allows someone to feed themselves. The research that drives this technology was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

      In addition to providing research grants, the federal government can convene and encourage communities of practice, such as the Health Datapalooza and the White House Maker Faire. And we can look for ways to lift barriers to innovation, which is what my team in the HHS IDEA Lab does, finding ways to hack red tape and help create programs like the NIH 3D Print Exchange, a platform for people to share templates, like the patterns you would use to sew a dress, but in this case it might be a template for printing a prosthetic hand or a model for a heart.

      Reply