The Next Frontier in Healthcare Innovation
BY ALL MEASURES, the home is the future of healthcare. Not only will more people receive care in their homes, but many medical procedures that have historically been carried out in institutional settings will be administered in patients’ living rooms. This shift is being accelerated by improvements to automation and artificial intelligence (AI) such as chatbots, enabling the notion of ‘care anywhere’ in Canada and across the globe.
The growing appetite for home care is a response to three main drivers: increasing access problems (wait times), growing patient and family expectations (choice, convenience, quality) and society’s inability (or unwillingness) to continue to pay for the costs of delivering healthcare in formal institutions, which are being outstripped by demand.
As of 2016, nearly 730,000 Ontarians were receiving home care services, 63 per cent of whom were over the age of 65. The market for home care services administered by the private and public sectors will only continue to expand as the number of older adults and people with multiple complex medical and social needs grows. For example, by 2041, the number of seniors aged 65 and over in Ontario is expected to double from 2.3 million to 4.6 million.
To better understand this shifting landscape, I recently sat down with Canadian healthcare innovators Zayna Khayat and Chris Ferguson to ask what’s in store for the future of home care and what people inside and outside of the healthcare sector should be aware of. Following are the hightlights of our conversation.
Why is home
