AARP: Digital health needs to shift to prevention to help seniors
AARP’s CEO, Jo Ann Jenkins, has told the HIMSS Connected Health Summit that digital health entrepreneurs need to stop making devices that merely react to ailments, and start focussing on positive products to ensure seniors remain healthy into their old age. Only 20% of seniors' health status is down to genetics, and another 20% is down to the quality care received, but the remaining 60% is up to choices the individual makes in their everyday lives. Digital health needs to aid those individuals in making choices that lead to disease prevention, and physical and mental fitness, not in aiding them in physical diminishment and disease treatment. 

Innovators in healthcare need to shift their focus in four key areas in order to develop effective digital health offerings for seniors, according t0 AARP's CEO Jo Ann Jenkins, who spoke at the HIMSS Connected Health Summit in the Washington DC-area this week.

The four areas are: a shift from focusing on physical and mental diminishment to focusing on physical and mental fitness; a shift from focusing on treatment to focusing on disease prevention; a shift from being dependent patients to empowered users of the healthcare system; and finally, a shift from uncertain access to care to dependable access to care.

Jenkins pointed to a widely cited stat from the US Census Bureau: 10,000 people turn 65 years old each day, a trend that will continue every day for the next 15 years.

"It’s a market that can be deeply valuable to the mHealth sector, just as you can [be] to it," Jenkins continued. "We used to say that the secret to a long and healthy life was to choose your parents well. But in fact only about 20 percent of health status is due to genetics. Another 20 percent due to medical care we receive. The remaining 60 percent, a majority that is down to the choices we make throughout our lives. What we eat, how much and what kinds of exercises we do, where we live, the quality of our relationships, whether or not we choose to smoke, and our ability to handle everyday stress."

But according to Jenkins, currently the healthcare system is focused on treating ailments instead of working on preventing disease and improving a person's wellbeing. And this is not a matter of money — the US spends nearly $3 trillion on healthcare, Jenkins said.

"Yet as you know, compared to other countries with similar income levels, we have poorer health and shorter life expectancies," she said. "We simply cannot continue to keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing with regard to health. We have to embrace the new vision of health that emphasizes wellbeing."

Jenkins argues that mobile health can help solve many of these problems.

"Physical and mental diminishment are things that happen to us if we don’t do anything to stop them," she explained. "Physical and mental fitness are the results of things we do to achieve them. And fitness demands and approach while diminishment is passive... We are taking more responsibility for our own health, seeking more and better information to help us making healthier decisions, and [seeking] tools to help us adapt lifestyle change that lead us towards physical and mental fitness, and enhance our wellbeing, not just treat our ailment."

Some of the initiatives that AARP is involved with to help create such offerings include Project Catalyst, a research initiative involving other partners including Pfizer, UnitedHealthcare, and Georgia Tech as well as a live pitch event that the company first started three years ago.

Project Catalyst, announced in April, aims to identify challenges and find solutions that will improve the quality of life for people as they age. The organization's first research study was on physical activity trackers. Jenkins said they are now in the midst of a second study on medication adherence, and have just started a third, focused on the needs of caregivers.

And since launched in pitch events three years ago, Jenkins said 15 of the 35 finalists have raised over $50 million in investments and two have dropped out after getting acquired.