Real World Experimentation

The BIF Elder Experience Lab is a real world laboratory for understanding and improving the elder experience.

Working with elders who open their lives to us, the BIF team uses an observational/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. We couple this with a unique storytelling capability to bring the elder experience to life in a new and exciting way.

BIF’s non-profit platform and embedded storytelling capability enable us to openly share lab outputs. With this unique positioning, BIF can deliver strategic benefits to our Partners while broadly sharing outputs from lab activity with the public. BIF is committed to using this platform to accelerate the design and development of transformative solutions in elder care that cut across the entire elder care system and integrate insights and capabilities from across traditional industry and sector boundaries.

The Elder Care Challenge: What’s the Big Deal?

BIF launched the Elder Experience Lab because incremental fixes are not enough to create system-wide transformation. Consider this:

• There are more nursing homes in America than McDonalds.
• The current cost model unsustainable, nursing home care costs expected to increase from $125 billion (‘06) to $300 billion in 2015 and $700 billion in 2030.
• Current system unprepared to serve the baby boomers: By 2030, 85 million people will be over age 65 (compare to 35 million today).
• Options for aging in place are limited by poor integration of services/products into home environments, lack of supporting system.

We will always need environments that offer significant 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.

The appetite for transformative, system-level change has been strengthened by current economic crisis and the un-sustainability of current cost model. Significant opportunities exist to design new systems that deliver health and wellness services to aging in place elders. The big winners will be those that launch new networked models of product/service delivery that reach elders where and when they need them.

“Time is Now” attitude has created new demand for alternatives; baby boomers are planning for their futures.

Going Forward: The Aging in Place Experience

What will it take to enable more elders to live well within non-institutional environments?

• New networked models and integrated health and wellness solutions
• Significant innovation in how services are delivered
• Intentional focus on what the individual (not the institutions) needs to age well
• Bold new business models for meeting elders unmet needs
• A neutral platform for experimenting that moves ideas from the whiteboard into the real world to accelerate the design and implementation of market making solutions.

The Elder Experience Lab is ideally suited to enable multi-partner collaborations that enable participants to deeply understand the aging in place experience and identify opportunities for solutions that better meet the needs of baby boomers who want to age in place.

BIF’s non-profit status creates a unique platform for this work and our focus on transformative innovation—not incremental fixes—makes the lab complimentary to most organization’s current innovation and R&D programming.

Most importantly, collaboration between partners enables flow of information and insights critical to developing networked business models that link capabilities across traditional boundaries.

BIF has been working with existing and new partners to establish new work in the lab to specifically tackle the aging-in-place experience. Learn more about current work to advance a multi-partner collaboration to understand the aging-in-place experience.