Tipping Points for Global Aging

By Michael Hodin

If you were anywhere near Toronto, Canada this past week, and attending the International Federation on Aging Global Conference, you would have sensed one of the most important global megatrends of our time: aging. Aging fits Malcolm Gladwell’s description of a tipping point: “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” This year’s IFA conference was proof that a broad group of leading organizations and individuals are recognizing that we have reached just such a tipping point on aging — and they’re taking action because of it.

At this year’s IFA conference, we saw the aging conversation continue to shift from a focus on taking care of the elderly through social services and charities to include a new focus on business solutions, not least, using technology to enable healthier and more active aging across the life course. This comes at a key time, as we can all congratulate the WHO for setting health in the context of aging with the Decade of Healthy Ageing. This is about all of us — whether you’re 9 or 92. In an era of long lives — living to a hundred is the norm for our grandchildren — and society’s ever-reducing birth rates, aging is the strategic prism through which 21st century society must organize.

So what will the future of aging look like?

I was joined by a panel of experts to discuss one key answer: the emergence of remote care technology. These innovations have an important role to ensure more efficient and effective care at the intersection of longevity, health and wellness, and home and the community — three trends that are defining 21st-century aging. The panelists — John Beard from the WHO; Shurjeel Choudhri from Bayer; Jisella Dolan from Home Instead Senior Care; and Dave Ryan from Intel — discussed their insights and vision for the immense value that remote care can offer our aging society. In effect, how remote care becomes our 21st century standard of care. Three ideas are essential:

Harnessing the opportunities for existing technologies. Amazing remote care technologies are already here, from flip phones to monitor heart failure in India to tech-enabled solutions for medication adherence and diabetes management here in the U.S. We must now fully realize these opportunities by integrating remote care technologies into care systems and creating deployment and payment models that ensure access. This will enable remote care to deliver health and economic benefits to patients, caregivers, and health systems in countries around the world.

Recognizing the challenge of changing human behavior. Innovators like Home Instead Senior Care are finding ways to ensure 21st century care is both high-tech and high-touch. If we can develop and deploy technologies that support social engagement, healthy behaviors, and self-care, then we will save health costs — and lives — for generations to come. “Remote care is an efficient, scalable, and elegant way to expand the world’s capacity to care,” explained Dolan. It can also, as our colleague from Bayer so well articulated, enable more innovations as well as better usage once new discoveries are on the market. That long-standing goal of “changing the game on adherence and compliance of medicines themselves may be in sight through remote care applications,” says Choudhri.

Embracing functional ability. As the WHO has recognized, health is more than the absence of disease — it’s functional ability. This means enabling older adults to stay healthy, active, and independent throughout their lives — and remote care can play a key role in achieving these goals. This will also require addressing ageism– as Dr. John Beard, Director of WHO Ageing and Life Course and leader of the new WHO Ageing and Health Strategy, laid out so well in the Opening Plenary — which is the final discrimination frontier to be breached and overcome.

So thank you to the panelists, and three cheers for Jane Barratt and her first-rate and capable staff for pulling off the conference where over 1,300 people — from government, business, NGOs, academics, and just plain interested types — made their way from over 70 countries to discuss bold innovations, like remote care technology. Not only are these dedicated leaders adding aging to the top of the global agenda, they are planning and taking concrete steps to drive effective, real-world change that supports a shared vision for the future of aging.

It was right that the IFA’s theme was about “Preparing for the Decade of Healthy Ageing,” which will be declared at the 2020 World Health Assembly. If it is the case that in developed economies, 70% of disposable income is held by those 60+, then businesses and the private sector will certainly have a role to play. We are at a tipping point: we can use these facts to give voice to all of us who will live longer in our 21st century.