Caregiving: Take a Tablet and E-Mail My Family

Jennifer Hicks a contributor at Forbes wrote a piece on simple tablet/technology for in home caregivers. It is called the Betty Care Tablet. This is a point-of-care system to help in home caregivers focus on patients and not paper work. Yup yup and more yup the world and in particular the US has a bolus of rapidly aging individuals with an estimated world population of 65+ to be 523 million in mid 2010.

Hicks shares the implementation of The Betty Care Tablet by Caring Senior Service. There goal is to reduce or eliminate abuse, neglect, and theft of the in-home care industry. This will be done at no cost.

The Betty Care Tablet designed for private duty home care agencies. The caregiver uses the tablet in the home setting for tasks such as scheduling, daily logs, and alerts with the office without paperwork. Families with internet access can log in from any mobil device for real-time updates.

Betty Care identifies the ability to easily update care plans based on need and goals. Changes are pushed to the tablet without delay all the while tracking real time activity feeds with weekly and monthly reports so the family is up to date.

On the Betty Care site they address the salient point of the idea, differentiation from other in-home caregiving organizations. Information can be collected, with notes and forms with checkboxes with easy to publish to the corporate portal.

I like the idea and would be interested in knowing levels of satisfaction from family members as well as if reports are sent to the PCP for chart update?

One other point to consider. Austin Frakt writing at The Incidental Economist stepped back to look at health insurance in America in an excellent piece “Stop rearranging deck chairs and focus on the engine room“. His primary point we need to examine healthcare delivery where 80 cents of each dollar ends up in the delivery system. Is Betty Care improving delivery? I think it is and I think this point to new business ideas across the spectrum of our healthcare system. 

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