As adoption of technologies like artificial intelligence or remote monitoring expand within senior care and living, certain systems fail to catch up with the pace of innovation or become obsolete.
While 44% of nursing homes grew their technology adoption over a two year-period from 2019 to 2021, some 28% of nursing homes experienced technology “abandonment” during the same time frame, a new study shows.
Tech abandonment is defined as “failure to scale up, spread, and sustain” previously adopted systems, study authors wrote.
The definition indicates that the scope of abandoned tech is not merely discontinued services such as outdated software, but rather a failure to provide or nurture certain technologies across an entire facility or organization.
With nursing homes and other senior care spaces more reliant than ever on tech, conducting analyses on why they abandon tech were as important as studies about tech growth, the researchers stated.
While the researchers said that the reason why sites abandon certain technologies was “beyond the scope of this study,” they did find that the majority of nursing homes that abandoned administrative technology were larger operations of 120 beds or more.
“Technology abandonment can increase strain on scarce resources and may impact administrators’ ability to oversee clinical operations, especially in large nursing homes,” the study authors state.
While the research doesn’t indicate whether some tech is abandoned to put new, better systems in place, some technology may have been discontinued to create greater efficiencies, the researchers speculate. They added that other studies have shown tech doesn’t always turn out to improve caregivers’ and staff’s workflow.
Over the past few years, some facilities have been challenged to increase their internet bandwidth, to maintain software like Zoom calls and cybersecurity protection. During the pandemic, it was noted that some software implementation, particularly tied to security, was put on hold, or sidelined due to supply chain issues, McKnight’s reported.
The study was published in this month’s Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.
