Senior living in the future will be more of a “community hub, not the old-age ‘ghetto,’” predicted Bob Kramer, speaking Tuesday during a panel discussion at the 2023 Future of Health Summit sponsored by the Milken Institute. The founder of the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care, who subsequently founded national think tank Nexus Insights, called for “energy hubs of revitalization, rather than ghettos where we park old people because they’re useless.”
Nexus Insights, it was announced Monday, will merge into the new Aging Innovation Collaborative within the Milken Institute’s Center for the Future of Aging.
Americans are living longer than previous generations but generally are ill-prepared for where and how they want to live in their retirement years, said moderator Caitlin MacLean, senior director of innovative finance at the institute.
“We need to have more investment into the opportunities and the availability of housing so that when we age, we have the appropriate infrastructure and care involved.” MacLean said. By the end of this decade, she noted, for the first time ever, more people will be aged more than 65 years than there are people aged fewer than 18 years.
Fifty-four percent of the 14.4 million middle-income older adults in 2029 in the United States will lack the financial resources to pay for senior housing and care, and a combination of public and private efforts will be needed to address the looming crisis, according to the findings of a NIC-funded study.
The “forgotten middle,” “basically have too much in resources to qualify for government support for things like long-term care or housing subsidies but not enough to afford most private-pay senior living options or to afford home care at home for very long. And so that group, that “forgotten middle,” is huge,” Kramer said.
Older adults need housing and support, according to panelist Lynne Katzmann, PhD, president and CEO of Juniper Communities. She said that she prefers the term “lifestyle management” over “care” because it encompasses support services, assessment, care planning and monitoring.
“Housing has become healthcare in our setting, because we help manage nutrition, we help you get exercise, we enable you to live your best life in the way that you want. So for us, we consider that lifestyle management,” she said. “Caregivers are no longer caregivers. They’re lifestyle managers. Right? People want to have partners in caring.”
Technology is changing the face of long-term care, according to the experts. Katzmann said that for residents, voice-activating technology is important, and automation and business optimization are essential.
“That’s critical when you’re a staff member in a senior living community. Right now, we spend a lot of time documenting, running around, making sure that one person knows something that the resident needs and we’ve got to tell them,” Katzmann said. “It doesn’t work well. So we’ve got to use technology and data and new workflows to improve our business and make the job of the caregiver that much easier.”
Kramer received the inaugural McKnight’s Pinnacle Award Career Achievement Award in 2023. Katzmann is a 2023 McKnight’s Pinnacle Award Thought Leader honoree and in 2019 was the first recipient of the McKnight’s Women of Distinction Lifetime Achievement Award.
