As technology informs and shapes the delivery of healthcare, integrating ubiquitous data sources in a seamless to inform healthcare is essential. As you’ll hear throughout this interview, complex problems call for really collaborative and innovative solutions. Dr. Heather Young, National Director for Betty Irene Moore Nurse Fellows in Leadership and Innovation Program and the Founding Dean Emerita for the School of Nursing at University of California Davis, joined us for a discussion on technology’s growing role in transforming healthcare. Dr. Young provided her unique insights on new approaches to promote healthy aging, the changing interface between older adults and healthcare providers, and the challenges we face going forward ensuring healthcare equity in a world increasingly enabled through technology and data. Here are some interview highlights.
- What technology can do to improve our systems of care: “Enabling technology can do many things for us, it can foster connection, it can promote wellness, it can monitor chronic health conditions, it can help a person to continue to live longer at home, which is what most people really want to do – by making the environment smart, and it can also improve our systems of care.”
- What challenges are we facing bringing current technology to elder care: “One of the most important challenges we have in technology at this point is how do you integrate disparate sources of data? To actually turn it into improving health for an older person living in their home, informing their caregivers and engaging their health care providers, there has to be more integration. These are kind of ubiquitous technology challenges, actually; they go beyond aging and beyond healthcare. These are the kinds of grand challenges [we have] to really optimize technology.”
- Ensuring access to technology promotes equity in healthcare: “We’re going to see an incredible increase in older adults using technology in the coming decades. But access is not equitable. There’s a digital divide that relates to technology, literacy, affordability, and connectivity. If we’re really going to adopt technology as a major tool in healthcare delivery, the costs need to be addressed at some level.
- How technology impacts capacity: “We can’t even produce enough healthcare workers to meet the needs [of today’s aging population] adequately. So that says that we need to transform the way we do it. We need to think about both technology and teamwork differently – organizing people in such a way that we can optimize the contribution of each person who’s on the team and using technology to the extent that we can, both to deliver care and to prepare people to be able to work in the in the future.”
- Advice for leaders in healthcare and technology: “Listen to the people you’re designing for. They’re too often silenced by the isms: ageism, ableism, racism, sexism. The intersectionality of these elements, marginalizes people even further. As the demographics of our society is changing, our thinking about inclusion has to change. And if we’re really going to do human-centered design [we have to] come up with solutions that fit the people we’re trying to design for, no matter what it is – whether it’s education or practice, or community work. We have to partner in new and creative ways.”
I hope you enjoy listening to Heather’s thoughtful and compassionate insights.
-TA
