Summary
When the Business Innovation Factory set out to create a real-world laboratory for developing and testing new solutions for improving elderly care, we knew it would be an exciting and challenging endeavor. What we didn't know was how deeply personal and inspiring the process of building the Nursing Home of the Future (NHoF) would be.
With almost three months of work behind us (and just two months left before we present the outcomes of phase 1 at the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit in October), the NHoF team is using an integrated design and observational approach to understand what it means to live in an assisted living or nursing care home. For the team this has meant hundreds of hours at Tockwotton Home, a 30-bed assisted living center and 42-bed skilled nursing facility, talking with residents, participating in social events, meeting with families, talking with staff, interviewing experts and documenting everything with audio, video and still photography.
The NHoF initiative is allowing BIF to capture the experiences of residents as they move through daily life to construct a more accurate picture of how residents interact with the facility and staff, utilize private and shared spaces, make use of equipment and furnishings, access medical care and engage in recreational activities. The end goal is to use this method of real-time, direct end-user engagement to create a sustainable platform for quickly and cost effectively testing new ideas and products while simultaneously determining if a novel solution will work in a real-world environment.
For the first phase of activity, BIF's team of designers and researchers are creating an accessible (and visual) characterization of the current experience of nursing home and assisted-living residents. This "experience map" will reveal unmet needs in the current care model and help the team identify an initial set of target opportunities for intervention in phase II. As the project's field reports confirm, understanding and capturing the day-to-day experience of the residents has been a tough but deeply fulfilling experience.
With help from our partners (Quality Partners of Rhode Island, Tockwotton, MIT Age Lab), the NHoF team is moving full speed ahead and looking forward to sharing the outcomes of phase 1 with you at the BIF-4 Summit.Download the first project progress report here.
Public Presentation on the NHoF
Although the team is looking forward to wrapping up phase one activity, the work to create the NHoF lab will continue long after October. Tockwotton Home will open a new 150-bed facility in 2010 in which they will dedicate a patient unit and common living areas to the Nursing Home of the Future initiative. This will provide project partners with an opportunity to participate in a holistic redesign of the resident experience, including the physical space of the facility. This space will also create a sustainable platform for ongoing innovation in elder care.
The BIF team held their first public briefing on the NHoF project on Wednesday, September 10 at BIF headquarters in Providence. The audience was very diverse and included experts such as Richard Besdine (director of Brown University’s Gerontology Center); administrators from local nursing homes, aging citizens interested in the project, representatives from Tockwotton, and representatives from other BIF member and partner companies. Approximately 40 people participated in the briefing.
The conversation about the NHoF project had effect BIF hoped for: nursing home administrator sat next to medical equipment designers while an engineering director from a precision measurement multinational company talked with the activities director at Tockwotton. A public relations professional discussed public perceptions of aging with a nurse. The chairs filled with CEO’s, caregivers, and retirees, some from the health care field, but many from other occupations and walks of life.
Following the formal presentation the group took questions from the floor. The participants were eager to discuss what components of the project they found most compelling and what areas for exploration we had thus far overlooked. Questions included: Have we thought about giving this presentation to medical school and nursing students as part of their core training? Could we use these insights to improve the experience of younger people with disabilities who are living in assisted living or rehab environments? How could we measure the effects of innovations in relationship to the rate of clinical depression in nursing home residents? Which of these insights also applied to elders aging in their own homes? The conversation revealed that there is a strong appetite for follow on work across communities, in both in the nursing home and in other environments.
The next public presentation of the project will occur on October 15 at the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit.
Anticipated Phase I Outcomes:
- Delivery of a holistic, user-centric view of the current elder care environment, including an on-the-ground, multi-media depiction of the everyday experience of residents in assisted living / nursing care facilities and an integrated assessment of current research
- Creation of a media platform that presents an accessible and compelling view of the elder care environment and creates channels for partners and stakeholders to input ideas, share information and participate in an ongoing conversation about the NHoF lab and its activities
- Detailed descriptions of NHoF laboratory protocol with a clearly defined architecture for partner participation in follow-on activities
- Creation of an actionable network of stakeholders who are invested in elder care innovation
- A starter set of opportunities to be tested in the NHoF laboratory during phase II of the initiative, set to begin in mid-fall 2008
Upcoming Activity
The following activities are upcoming in the next two weeks.
- Continue deep experience capture with selected residents, their families and caregivers. Video footage will focus on daily routines, transitions throughout the day, relationships and visits, standout experiences (good and bad)
- Preparation of graphic characterizations of the experience (experience maps)
- Integration of secondary research
- Preparation of public depiction of outcomes from phase 1
- Review of materials by advisory board
- Initial planning for Phase II activity
