Healthy Aging
Technology Helps Bring Home Health Care to Isolated Seniors Living in the Eastern Sierras
 ucked into the snow-dusted foothills of the Eastern Sierra counties of Inyo and Mono are small clusters of homes and isolated dwellings, often reachable only by dirt roads. Nearly 14,000 square miles of rural outposts and five Indian reservations are connected by a single highway, U.S. Route 395.
Pioneer Home Health Care, Inc. (Pioneer) was founded by administrator Patricia West in 1990 to provide skilled, intermittent medical and rehabilitative care to frail, disabled and elderly patients in their homes. Based in Bishop, the region’s largest town, Pioneer is the only service of its kind in an area the size of Maryland and the District of Columbia combined. The majority of the agency’s clients are over the age of 80.
“Our goal is to keep elderly folks out of the hospital and to keep them as well-informed and empowered as possible to manage their own disease processes,” said West.
 But the logistical challenges are considerable. To provide home health care to just one ailing resident can involve long hours of driving on roads subject to extreme weather conditions. With a small staff that is stretched thin (six nurses, three of whom are part-time; one physical therapist; one social worker; and two home health aides), one way to increase efficiency is through technology.
In June 2007, TCWF awarded Pioneer a three-year, $150,000 grant to provide home health care to the region. The funding enabled Pioneer to purchase electronic equipment and recruit a full-time physical therapist—a major effort in a region with no higher educational institutions for health professionals.
“Our goal is to keep elderly folks out of the hospital and to keep them as well-informed and empowered as possible to manage their own disease processes.”
“As a provider in a rural/frontier part of our state, Pioneer must cope with tremendous client needs while challenged by a scarcity of local resources,” said Jeffrey S. Kim, TCWF program director. “Out of necessity, it has adopted some creative service delivery approaches to ensure that it can continue providing high-quality services to homebound seniors.”
One tool that has become indispensable is the “telehealth” unit that is placed in the homes of medically fragile patients for a period of 30 to 60 days. These easy-to-use, audiovisual desktop devices serve multiple purposes. They remind the patient to take prescribed medication, ask questions that help the patient monitor symptoms and know when to call a nurse, provide educational material about diet and medication, and relay personal health data—such as blood sugar level and blood pressure—to the agency for follow-up by a clinician.
“The unit becomes an extension of our eyes and ears, letting us use our human resources more effectively,” West said. “Not a single one of our patients ended up with a rehospitalization while they were on telehealth.”
The grant also enabled Pioneer to replace the old, bulky laptops used by staff to document patient health data with high-speed, lightweight, tablet-sized models.
“The old laptops had a flip-up top that became a barrier between the clinician and the patient,” West said. “The patient would say, ‘What are you writing about me?’ But now they can participate. There’s so much data that can be shared with the patient.”
For more information, please visit www.pioneerhomehealth.com
|
