About the Elder Experience Lab

The Business Innovation Factory created the Elder Experience Lab in 2008 to create a platform for experimentation where partners can design and test new solutions to improve the elder experience. In our quest to build a living laboratory for transforming elder care in America, we began with one simple premise: put the elder experience at the center. Our methodology and unique non-profit positioning has enabled BIF to create a laboratory where elders are directly engaged in an ongoing effort to better understand the elder experience and R&D work aimed at improving it. The BIF Elder Experience Lab works with elder volunteers to conduct deep research into elders every day experience. We use these insights to illuminate opportunities for transforming the elder care system, and with help from the Lab's elder participants, put new ideas to the test in a real-world environment.

Today, we have within our reach hundreds of solutions that could help older Americans live fuller, more independent lives. But our current system for delivering care to elders is broken, and even after investing hundreds of billions of dollars, most elders do not enjoy the quality of life they deserve. If today’s approach for delivering care is in trouble, try to imagine this system as it stretches to accommodate the arrival of the baby boomers.

BIF launched the Elder Experience Lab in 2008 to create a platform where partners can design and test new solutions to transform elder care in America. We began with a simple premise: put the elder experience at the center. This idea remains a guiding principle within the lab and powers our work to understand, capture and transform the elder experience.

Almost all of us have a story to share about our own experience with elder care, whether we were caring for a loved one, working within healthcare or ourselves dealing with the challenges of getting older. Even at its best, the experience isn’t very good. Nor is it sustainable, economically or culturally. And things are only going to get worse as the baby boomers age.

Intuitively, we knew this. But we wanted to go deeper, get to the source, and hear from elders, first hand, about their experience. So we did.

Working with elders who open their lives to us, the BIF team uses an observational and ethnographic approach to understand how elders interact with their environments, utilize shared and private spaces, care for body and mind, and stay connected with their friends and with the world.

From simple things like eating and dressing to the challenges elders often face staying connected to the community, the BIF team has chronicled the current elder experience, using narrative, video and photography to reveal insights into the experience and illuminate opportunities for transformative innovation.

We had the great pleasure of working with an especially talented group of elders at Tockwotton Home, an assisted living and skilled nursing center. They shared their experiences with great candor and grace and, through their generosity, helped the BIF team lay a strong foundation for work in the lab.

With every activity in the lab we strive to put elders in the driver’s seat of a new kind of elder care R&D. Too often, the conversations about elder care innovation are dominated by the institutions that provide services. That conversation takes on a new dimension when the elder experience is put center stage and elders, in their own voices, share first person insights about what works and what doesn’t. Beyond our observational work, the lab uses elder focus groups and workshops that directly engage elders in research and design activities. [Read about the Lab’s recent work in Medication Management]

We believe that incremental changes will not be enough to “fix” the elder care system. When we launched the Elder Experience Lab we wanted to motivate more players to think about what the “Nursing Home of the Future” should look like. In pursuit of this mission, we have created a map of the experience and a first pass catalogue of some of the opportunities for improving it.

Here’s the catch: The nursing home of the future isn’t a nursing home at all. We will always need environments that offer deep clinical services for elders facing significant physical or medical challenges, and those environments may share some characteristics with today’s nursing home model. But what we really need is a new elder care system—one that offers today and tomorrow’s elders access to a flexible, integrative network of health and wellness services that are available when and where they need them.

This will be even more true in the decades to come as the boomers age. There are good social and physical reasons for why most boomers want to age in their homes and in their communities. But the economic imperative to help more elders age in place is equally powerful. There are already more nursing homes in America than McDonalds. There simply is no way that the current system can absorb the million of boomers who are on their way to old age!

Our work has taught us that journey of aging isn’t linear. As we age we may get sick, then get well. We may live on our own, or need help. And the spectrum of the kind of help we may need is broad.

This strengthens our resolve that systems-level transformation is the only pathway toward delivering to our elders the care and support they deserve. We believe that experimentation is key to breaking through old ways of thinking to create truly novel approaches to elder care. The BIF elder experience lab is this place.

We thank our partners for making our work possible. But most importantly we thank all of the people—elders, boomers, care givers, experts, designers, community leaders—who make work in the lab possible.

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