How to be a Home Health Technician

Home health technology, sometimes known as telehealth, is hot.

It's so hot that most of us are tired of all those stats that portend a booming market: the aging population, proliferation of broadband, new technologies, rising health-care costs, and so on.

Here are some of those stats:

• In the next 20 years, 10,000 new retirees will be added to Social Security and Medicare rolls each day
• 25% of Americans aged 50 to 64 spend more than 10% of their income on healthcare
• The cost for an assisted living facility or nursing home runs $6,000 to $25,000 per month
• Home health aides cost $150 to $200 per day
• 59% of consumers are, or expect to be, informal caregivers
• Over 32% of home care agencies that do not currently have a telehealth system are planning on purchasing one in the next 24 months
• 7.6 million Americans currently receive home care because of acute illness, long-term health conditions, permanent disability, or terminal illness

So what is home health technology and how can integrators get a piece of the action?

By far the most popular implementation of the technology is PERS, or personal emergency reporting systems. By some estimates, there are 1.35 million monitored PERS accounts today in the United States.

But PERS is just one aspect of home health care that could be attractive to home systems integrators.

CE Pro discussed several others in the Webinar "Digital Home Healthcare: The Next Big Market" recently. During the Webinar, three integrators discussed three different business models for serving seniors aging in place, disabled individuals living independently, and other potential clients with health issues.

SimplyHome's Healthcare Practice

Jason Ray of Simply Home/Community Management Initiative, based in Arden, N.C., is one integrator who shared his experiences in the Webinar. His company was a developer/manager of long-term care facilities before moving into the systems integration business. So Ray understands the needs of the elderly and disabled, the doctors and caretakers, and the people who pay for it.

Ray's foray into home technology began in the early part of this decade, when he noticed an industry-wide shift from larger healthcare facilities to more community-based models. SimplyHome already was installing PERS, but wanted more.

"As we were looking at that [community] model," he says, "we started thinking: How could we provide additional support to make this more efficient? How can we use technology?"