​“In Touch With iPads,” written by Nicole Francis for the November 2012 issue of Provider magazine, was honored recently as Best Senior Technology Article for the 2013 ALTY Awards, an annual event of Assisted Living Today’s website.

It’s clear that policymakers want long term care professionals to adopt new technologies and adopt open attitudes to technology. The Affordable Care Act, for instance, requires states to adopt stringent information technology (IT) requirements for Medicaid enrollment. Forty-seven states already have either submitted or been given approval for plans, according to a recent report from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The feds have promised to pay for 90 percent of upgrade costs for now, but the requirements “require substantial investments in IT infrastructure at a time when state fiscal situations remain constrained,” Kaiser said.

As the long term care environment is facing continual change, new communications, as well as health information technology (HIT), are emerging at an ever-quickening pace. Recently, eight leaders in long term care HIT came together at the Long Term Post-Acute Care (LTPAC) HIT Summit to read the tea leaves and offer insights on topics ranging from the future impact of new tools like iPads and Siri, to HIT interoperability, to how long term care can add more value to the health care continuum.

The typical nursing home patient is no longer somebody’s grandmother; many people in their 40s and 50s live in nursing homes alongside those in their later years. Because of the paradigm shift in health care, programming has taken a dramatic turn. Staff members are learning to adjust and create new ways to deliver care and activities to this new diverse population.

Several key factors weigh in on this wave of technology developments: increased documentation requirements and the impact on an already overburdened staff, cost cuts by public and private payers requiring more efficient resource utilization, regulations spurred by provisions of the health care reform law that require short-cycle dispensing of medication, and constant efforts toward improving accuracy and quality of patient care.

The goals of bringing high-tech and innovation to the nursing facility level are to make life better for residents, make work less arduous for staff, and provide facilities easier methods to report outcomes to state and federal governments that are radically shifting reimbursement payment by making accountability king.

A new website is dedicated to patients who have terminal illnesses as a place where they can post their words, both private and public.

Patient care and wellness have always been defining attributes of Ethica Health & Retirement Communities. When Ethica’s medical director advisory board met in 2009 with key clinical leadership to discuss the need for appropriate specialty care for their patients, a solution was immediately forthcoming.

As today’s competitive health care market evolves toward a model of episodic bundled payments, those producing the highest-quality outcomes, the lowest cost per episode, and the lowest readmissions back to the hospital will have a significant competitive advantage. Contracts will be negotiated with providers willing to be held accountable for superior, data-driven outcomes.