Mobile Health IT Benefits Seniors

Efforts to turn Grandpa's cellphone into a tool for managing his diabetes or reminding him to take his medicine got a shot in the arm last week in the form of five grants for mobile health (mHealth) programs that serve older adults with chronic illnesses.

The Center for Technology and Aging announced $477,150 in grants to:

• CalOptima of Orange County, Calif., to use mHealth and wireless communications to keep Medicare patients with heart disease from needing higher levels of health care.
• Family Services Agency of San Francisco, to use a cloud-based electronic health record and a tablet-based touchscreen assessment and care-planning tool for assessing and coordinating services for frail, isolated, low-income seniors.
• Front Porch Center for Technology Innovation and Wellbeing of Los Angeles, for a medication-adherence app for cellphones used by active, independent seniors.
• HealthInsight of Utah, for an SMS-based mHealth diabetes education and care management program for seniors.
• Sharp HealthCare Foundation of San Diego, to remotely monitor and manage the care of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

"These technologies can and should be more rapidly adopted by health-care providers and patients because they reduce the use of [emergency rooms] and hospitals by older adults, diminish the need for those with chronic illness to move to intensive higher-cost care settings, and lessen the burden on family and professional caregivers," says David Lindeman, director of the Center for Technology and Aging.

The center, citing a report by Juniper Research, notes that remote health-monitoring technologies could save between $1.96 billion and $5.83 billion in health-care costs by 2014.

In its own draft report, "mHealth Technologies: Applications to Benefit Older Adults," the center says that mobile health technologies can facilitate chronic disease management, medication adherence, safety monitoring, access to health information, and wellness for seniors.

The Center for Technology and Aging was established with funding from the SCAN Foundation, which advocates sustainable quality care for seniors, and is affiliated with the Public Health Institute in Oakland, Calif.