Isolation Posed Biggest Barrier for Senior Care During COVID-19
Care coordination strategies emerged as a key takeaway for senior care providers during the coronavirus pandemic.
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- While senior care providers faced various challenges during the pandemic, for many the biggest challenge was seniors’ isolation from family and loved ones, according to survey participants in Xtelligent Healthcare Media’s most recent Insights report.
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“We were seeing that in our data the biggest issue was missing that connection with people who are often their caregivers, their loved ones, and having that social connection,” Emily Sokol, director of research at Xtelligent Healthcare Media, explained on Healthcare Strategies.
Nearly nine in ten provider respondents (86 percent) said that seniors’ inability to connect with family and loved ones was the biggest challenge in senior care during the pandemic. Meanwhile, six in ten providers (59 percent) answered that patients’ use of technology posed the most severe problems.
These findings overturned assumptions that technology was the most significant hurdle in care delivery for the senior population during the coronavirus pandemic.
That being said, technological barriers remained noticeable and, as a result, demanded heightened awareness around how to properly educate senior patients on telehealth and virtual care utilization.
“Seniors get a little bit of a bad rep for not being able to use technology and obviously there are some gaps and you have patients who are less savvy or less comfortable and confident using technology. But I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all by any means,” Sokol noted.
During the pandemic, some providers turned to methods such as visiting seniors and supporting them from a nearby room as the patients tried to navigate the telehealth experience.
However, dedicating that amount of time to educate seniors on telehealth and virtual care options can be difficult for providers who are already stretched thin. It will continue to be an issue even as the pandemic becomes more manageable, Sokol said.
“That’s a huge ask of providers who are already busy and overworked,” Sokol explained. “So that’s something that the industry as a whole is really going to need to start to grapple with is how do we bridge that gap and emphasize the education point.”
Set in this context, it was clear to seniors’ providers that the biggest lessons that they would carry forward with them out of the coronavirus pandemic were related to care coordination.
“We’re almost at a place where the industry can take a collective breath and say, ‘now how can we use this technology to not only optimize what we’re doing but really go back the bread and butter of what we do and emphasize that care coordination to improve patient outcomes and improve access to care for our seniors,” said Sokol.
