What role has the healthcare, insurance, government and caregiving provider industry played?
Jeannette Galvanek
in Blogs, Caregiving, Caregiving Ecosystem, Caregiving solutions, Caregiving technology, Healthcare, Healthcare disruption, Healthcare ecosystem, Home Caregiving
Unfortunately, informal, and home caregiving provision hasn’t received the investment and attention in the newest technology platforms in m-health, healthcare disruption, smart home, and other forward-looking efforts. Infrastructure and resource reallocation addressing non-medical care, local nursing and/ or home caregiving labor markets continue between the working family and formal care organizations. Without these joint efforts, increasingly, more and more healthcare and medical roles are falling to unpaid family members.
Family caregivers are often already employed and do not have the training, preparation, experience, or skills to meet those needs. This can compromise the quality of care they provide to deserving family and friends. It’s important to state that this is not willful neglect on the part of the healthcare industry, it’s likely a combination of a lack of awareness, a non-profit driven system, missing participation from private sector employers and delayed long-term strategies.
There’s plenty of healthcare disruption in the technology sector and that can be the main driver of healthcare industry support for caregivers. As medical, nursing, and other businesses build better technologies, we can expect more digital innovation in healthcare including connected IoT, devices, integration with the mobile enterprise, mobile health apps, and other exciting breakthroughs.
How can the healthcare industry and technology start to close these gaps and support employee caregivers?
As we’ve already discussed, the main benefits, certainly over the short- to medium-term will likely come from the innovation of employer, employee and with caregiving technology. A “digital infrastructure revolution” for healthcare creates a great opportunity for an honest, cross-industry conversation about caregiving.
Many major hardware and software manufacturers are already developing frameworks and technologies for improved health provision. If this combination of innovation, mobility, software, healthcare service providers, and the like included the corporate and employee common values and visions, that could make a seismic shift in caregiving provisions.
It would create a superior quality of life and care for both caregivers and elders and would be a modern, exciting vision for a work-life-care ecosystem. This type of “Corporate employer and healthcare ecosystem” would demonstrate how to use a foundation of work-life caring to improve the social commitments and quality of life, regardless of who was providing the care.
What can employers do right now to help employee caregivers?
Many of these aims are long-term initiatives, but businesses can start to make a difference, right now. Private sector corporations must take on the creation of a pro-care working environment. Workforce protection role and influence changes in the direct and indirect healthcare direction— this will:
- Protect working individuals with care commitments from job and productivity loss.
- Advocate for your workforce attraction and retention to shift the current direction caregiving.
- Revisit your policies remove worker and workforce impediments.
- Reduce team friction due to care-related disruptions and work redistribution.
- Help to avoid corporate morale problems such as increased care induced stress, family conflicts, and financial losses.
In terms of initiatives that directly support employees, there are several steps you can take
Extensive Work
- Moreover introducing extensive mobile work and flexibility across appropriate organizations.
- However Including adjustable work schedules, location independence, working from home, and paid days off.
- Embrace and invest in aligning employee and business caregiving solutions with mobile enterprise innovation.
- To provide the work, life, care technology for improved productivity.
- Moreover, train all employees and supervisors in work and caring effectiveness policy.
- Build workforce capabilities to provide the right level of support, both to employee caregivers directly. And team members that will be impacted by their absence.
- In addition the investment in work. The life and care mobile technology to allow employees to work and be productive on the job.
- Moreover, we offer employee assistance so that they can talk through issues about work and caregiving.
- Request that corporate insurance and healthcare vendors offer family care case management services.
We hope this has provided a useful overview of the current systemic issues with healthcare and caregiving provision. This is a difficult problem to solve. But with the right political will. For example, buy-in from the healthcare profession, and employers doing what they can, we can develop model employment and caregiving ecosystem.
