Companies helping employees care for their elderly parents

Every week, Intel Corp. dispatches small armies of 20-something social scientists and engineers to households of old people living at the four corners of the earth -- to Rochester, N.Y. (with any luck, in the middle of a snowstorm), to an impoverished Ugandan village (where living to a ripe old age means making it to 40), to southern Italy, where there's barely a concept of "nursing home."

The microchip giant crunched the data -- 860 million people worldwide who are diagnosed with one or more chronic diseases, a number that's expected to double by 2025 and double again by 2050 -- and read the tea leaves.

They see a future of profit gain for innovators with products and services to deal with this senior tsunami and years of profit drain at businesses where growing numbers of employees become caregivers.

"Yes, it's a business opportunity for Intel but it's also a business imperative," Eric Dishman, general manager and global director of Intel's Health Research & Innovation Group concedes. "We have 90,000 employees and we know that a third of them do elder care. For many, it's a huge challenge -- like having a day job and a night job."

According to an AARP study, the economic value of family caregiving is worth $350 billion a year -- with productivity losses costing American businesses $33 billion.

A 1999 MetLife study found that 33 percent of working women decreased work hours, 29 percent passed up a job promotion, and 22 percent took a leave of absence -- all in order to fulfill caregiving responsibilities.

As 78 million Baby Boomers reach retirement age in less than three years, the impact is set to skyrocket. By 2030, 60 percent of Boomers will be managing more than one chronic condition; by 2040, seniors will outnumber caregivers 3-to-1.

Dishman's Digital Health Group was formed by Intel two years ago and charged with focusing on diseases and elder care. It began scheduling regular forums for its employees to help them anticipate the impact of the demographic disruption on their own lives. It hosted a Washington, D.C., business summit July 17 on "Chronic Care at the Crossroads," focused on greater engagement between policy makers, health professionals, payers and caregivers.

Read the entire article on mlive.com

Shift Left

Mr. Grove says he is alarmed by several structural issues involving health care in America, notably, the huge number of uninsured, who are often forced to get primary care in emergency rooms.

To explain "Shift left," Mr. Grove describes the bottom axis of a scale in which products and services grow more full-featured, complicated and expensive as you move to the right. To "Shift left" on this scale is to, in effect, "Keep it simple, stupid."

Specifically, Mr. Grove is a big fan of low-cost, walk-in clinics, the sort beginning to appear in stores like Wal-Mart. He says they provide basic medical care for the uninsured, and also take some strain off of America's overloaded emergency rooms. But one thing missing from this emerging clinic infrastructure is a good system of medical record-keeping.

Mr. Grove, naturally, thinks technology can help. But rather than designing an elaborate and technically sophisticated medical-database system, something virtually every tech company is now trying to do, Mr. Grove suggests the exact opposite. Shift left; keep the record of a patient's visit in, for example, a generic but Web-accessible word-processing file.

Just like the early PC, it will be far from ideal, but it will be a start, and it can get better over time. The alternative, he says, is to wait endlessly for a perfect technology.

Students of business history will recognize the idea of a plain-vanilla medical record as an example of a "disruptive technology," which is initially opposed by powerful incumbents with a vested economic interest in shifting ever-rightward. So which powerful incumbents might oppose him now?

Read the full article on the post-gazette.com

Intel and IDA Ireland to invest $30 million in Technology Research for Independent Living Centre in Ireland

Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin TD today announced that Intel Corporation is to set up a Technology Research for Independent Living (TRIL) Centre in Ireland. The centre, which is supported by IDA Ireland, the Irish State agency for promotion of foreign direct investment, will involve significant research capabilities to address the challenges of ‘independent living’ for older people.

Approximately $30 million will be invested in the TRIL Centre over a period of three years and Intel will collaborate with several leading Irish universities, including UCD, TCD and NUI Galway to create one of the largest research efforts of this type in the world.

Read the entire article on FinFacts Ireland