Growing caregiver market seeks medication management solutions
AARP’s Project Catalyst — an initiative aimed at sparking healthcare innovation focused on people ages 50 years and older — in a report from April projects that by 2020, 117 million Americans will need some sort of caregiving assistance. At that point, the size of the market for the 45 million unpaid and 5 million paid caregivers is estimated to reach $72 billion, with RAND estimating opportunity costs around caregivers to be $522 billion every year, based on income unpaid caregivers lose in time spent on eldercare.
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The report, “Caregivers & Technology: What they Want and Need,” saw Project Catalyst and HITLAB conducting a representative survey panel, as well as ethnographic observations and interviews, to get a better sense of who makes up the caregiver market, what their challenges are and where technology might be able to ease their burden by meeting their needs. And with 92% of the caregivers surveyed considered tech literate, the report noted that there is a strong desire for solutions to help with caregiving.
“While many caregivers (43%) currently [are] using technology less than weekly to provide care, a large share of them want to use technology, especially when asked about technological solutions for specific activities they perform,” the report said. “On the near horizon, we see vast opportunity for technology innovators to create solutions that help alleviate the stress and workload of unpaid family caregivers.”
Among a caregiver’s workload are duties ranging from grocery shopping (87%) and housework (82%) to feeding (44%) and bathing (42%). From a pharmacy perspective, some 30% are in charge of dressing a patient’s wounds, and 74% of the caregivers surveyed said they administer medication — including pills and injections — to the person in their care. As a result, the study found high interest in solutions that could ease tasks around medication management.
Overall, 71% of caregivers said they were interested in using technology to support their caregiving activities, and prime among their interest is tech that aids in prescription refills and pickup — something in which more than three-quarters of caregivers said they were interested. Similarly, more than three-quarters are interested in technology that would help them monitor medication adherence, and approximately two-thirds are interested in solutions that would assist in giving patients medicines, pills and injections. Medication management was the most common challenge that caregivers noted in interviews.
The survey found that only about 11.3% of caregivers were already using technology to manage prescription refills, and 7.9% were using technology to facilitate delivery, though when asked, two-thirds said they were likely to use current technology. The largest barrier respondents identified was lack of awareness, but they also highlighted that aside from a lack of time to find and set up these solutions, there also is a lack of interoperability with pharmacies and a general fragmentation of solutions.
The report suggested a tech solution that meets multiple needs at once as a way to address these barriers, as caregivers are more willing to pay for a potentially more costly solution to multiple problems than a cheaper one that performs a single function. It also suggested that there is a “need for a trusted, authoritative and curated source that caregivers can use to identify apps or other digital tools that are recommended for their caregiving activities.”
The goal of innovators, the report said, should be finding solutions to address practical needs of caregivers who are being challenged daily with the tasks of caregiving, and who want dependable solutions.