Panel
Silver Threads: Weaving the Caregiving Tapestry | Global Conference 2024
Milken InstituteRichard Lui, Yvette Nicole Brown, Hon Pak, Naimish Patel, Dor Skuler, Kai Walker, Ellicote
- Caregiving solutions are expected to be developed within the next hour in response to current challenges, driven by a predicted shift of care into the home that creates a significant readiness gap for informal caregivers.
- The market for caregiving requires consolidation amidst mixed policy and reimbursement factors, with an anticipation that more than half of the population lacks retirement savings, exacerbating resource constraints for the 52% of people already identified as caregivers.
- Businesses are predicted to face a broken healthcare incentive model that sends patients home unnecessarily, requiring them to evolve reimbursement structures, break silos between housing and healthcare, and lower professional caregiving costs by leveraging technology to support lower-labor workers and virtual medical backing.
- Economic pressures include state governments like New York aiming to avoid $26.2 billion in Medicaid long-term care spending by keeping people at home, while Florida is expected to deploy an AI companion in approximately 50% of the state soon.
- A unified digital health front door is predicted to stitch together clinical, medication, lifestyle, and wearable data, with a specific prediction that AI companions will deliver measurable quality-of-life improvements 90% of the time and succeed by reaching a million homes.
- The "sandwich generation" will continue caring for elderly parents while raising children, prompting predictions that employers must offer flexibility for an aging workforce and that leadership skills developed through caregiving will become highly valued in business settings.
- South Korea's low birth rate of 0.7 is forcing a reconsideration of retired communities as a solution to workforce shortages, while the broader U.S. market is predicted to shift budgets toward prevention and aging at home away from skilled nursing facilities due to proven causality.
- Technological adoption among adults aged 50 and older is expected to increase, requiring products designed for fine motor skill complexities and hearing loss rather than those built for younger demographics, though the investment community currently neglects longevity despite it being the largest government budget line item.
- Behavioral health services remain the most requested yet under-supplied support, leading to predictions that mental health will be reframed as a strength and that financial planning tools like trusts and powers of attorney will ease crisis-related mental wellness.
- Success in caregiving culture is predicted to rely on avoiding employee demands by fostering a docile environment through a "culture of care," while shortening the learning curve for new caregivers through increased media representation and realizing that the actual number of caregivers likely exceeds current statistics.
- A unified marketplace is expected to emerge in the next five years to address the acute need for affordable senior housing and integration of housing and healthcare, reducing operational chaos for senior care operators through fewer doctor trips and reduced bed turnover.
- CMS regulations are anticipated to change to permit non-human care to address caregiver shortages, with AI companions projected to be a key utility in a million homes, though healthcare companies must demonstrate savings through actuarial longitudinal trials that take longer than proving efficacy.
- The outlook includes a predicted mindset shift where older adults are viewed as individuals to be loved rather than monitored, with a prediction that the market is warmer than it was five years ago, even if not quantified by a specific doubling or tripling of value.
- By the end of the session, it is predicted that all attendees will have been caregivers, needed care, or both, reflecting a changing culture where caregivers are emerging from the shadows and identifying more frequently over the last five years.