HEALTHY AGING
With America Getting Older, Northwell Health Is Investing in Home Care
“De Jonge’s mission was to treat what was treatable, while managing the symptoms of other conditions that were not curable, enabling Mr. Stankowski to remain at home.”
More from Michael Dowling
Presented by
Presented by
Michael Dowling, Northwell Health CEO from his new book The Aging Revolution
By the 1990s, house-calls were a relic from a previous era, which made Dr. de Jonge’s visits to the Stankowskis an outlier in a system that was increasingly facility and pay-for-service incentivized. But ask Dr. de Jonge today and he’ll tell you house-calls were a rewarding part of a healthcare mission centered around what mattered to his patients, one that built lasting, trusting relationships between doctor and patient.
“Being in the home allowed me to be more in a servant position as opposed to him coming to the office and getting a medicalized experience,” de Jonge recalls. “I would head home after home visits feeling like I touched human beings in a way that I couldn’t do in the clinic.”
Dr. de Jonge is one of several home care medicine pioneers featured in Dowling’s new book The Aging Revolution. The book explores the history behind a major focus of Northwell Health: how to care for America’s aging population. It’s a timely challenge. The number of older Americans is projected to nearly double in the next 40 years, from fifty-two million in 2018 to ninety-five million by 2060, with this age group’s share of the total population rising from 16 percent to 23 percent.[1] Meanwhile, more seniors than ever are expressing a desire to age-in-place, meaning healthcare systems that value its patients must prioritize independence at home. As Dr. Thomas Edes discovered, this philosophy was more financially and logistically feasible than many in medicine thought.
Here’s How Northwell Is Changing Healthcare to Address an Aging Population.
Here’s How Northwell Is
Changing Healthcare to
Address an Aging Population.
When Dr. Kedar Mate got the call that his grandmother was dying, he immediately left to be with her. She had been suffering from a combination of illnesses that prohibited her from doing what she loved most in life.
Age-Friendly Care Can Help You Age Well. Here’s What You Need to Know.
Age-Friendly Care Can Help
You Age Well. Here’s What You
Need to Know.
Age-Friendly care, adopted by Northwell, promotes life, longevity and quality of care for older adults and supports caregivers to achieve the best possible health outcomes
Dr. Edes worked at the VA’s home care program which offered veterans expert medical care in their own homes. When Dr. Edes heard the program was set to be cut for cost regions, he set out to prove the program’s worth by asking a simple question: home care may cost the VA $6k per patient per year, but what would it cost the VA to cut the program? Dr. Edes’ analysis revealed the VA was saving nearly $30k per patient per year by providing healthcare at home. How? By keeping patients stable at home so they did not require expensive in-patient and rehab stays.
The work of Dr. Edes and contemporaries like Dr. de Jonge and his colleagues at The American Academy of Home Care Medicine were enshrined into law in 2009 via the Independence at Home Act (H.R. 2560). The Independence at Home Act and the model it inspired shares many of its core values with Patient Priorities Care, the initiative launched by geriatrician Mary Tinetti. The Patient Priorities Care has since been a major contributor to Dowling’s thinking on the aging revolution.
“Patient Priority Care,” he writes in The Aging Revolution, “embodies much of the thinking and ethos of what The Aging Revolution is about. Patient Priority Care inherits the wisdom of what matters, then takes the next logical step: Turning what the patient most wants into reality.”
Northwell Health is doing its part to incorporate the Priority Patient Care ethos by pairing it with a focus on broadening independence at home through its Health at Home program.
“Northwell At Home is one of the largest home care nursing agencies in New York,” Dowling says. “Working closely with your doctor, our experienced team helps our patients manage conditions, recovery from an illness and monitor vital signs from the comfort of their home.”
Michael Dowling, Northwell Health CEO
"Working closely with your doctor, our experienced team helps our patients manage conditions, recovery from an illness and monitor vital signs from the comfort of their home."
While this program isn’t solely dedicated to older patients, the ability to be cared for in the place you feel most comfortable as you recover after an illness, injury, or accident, is paramount to older patients who want to stay out of the hospital. Home care services for cancer treatment, personalized rehabilitation services after joint replacement surgeries, diabetes management, heart failure treatment, stroke recovery, and hospice care are all available through the Health at Home program.
Northwell takes home care one step further, connecting patients with social workers to help patients with emotional, environmental and social needs. Patients who need a little extra help to remain independent at home receive it through Northwell’s Circle of Care program which provides dedicated and highly skilled aging life care specialists to help patients to continue to live independently. Circle of Care can provide safety assessments and recommendations for the home, scheduled visits for supportive counseling, assistance with bills, mail, household needs, and referrals to community resources.
“Looking to the future,” Dowling writes, “we are attracted by the age-friendly approach and the idea of what matters and how it can be a framework to fight ageism and promote person-centered care.”
And yet, Dowling acknowledges that challenges remain.
“We need to take more aggressive steps to make age-friendly care the nucleus of the doctor- patient relationship.”
As America ages, care in the home will continue to be an impactful differentiator in many patients’ quality of life. Northwell is committed to prioritizing what matters most to its patients while providing the expert care New Yorkers have come to expect from the state’s largest private healthcare system.
Learn more about the Independence at Home movement and how Northwell is fighting ageism in The Aging Revolution, available now.
Age-Friendly Care Can Help You Age Well. Here’s What You Need to Know.
Age-Friendly Care Can Help
You Age Well. Here’s What You
Need to Know.
Age-Friendly care, adopted by Northwell, promotes life, longevity and quality of care for older adults and supports caregivers to achieve the best possible health outcomes
In the early evening on a fall day in 1992, Dr. Eric de Jonge stopped by the home of one of his favorite patients for a regular check-in, a last stop before heading home after another grueling day of his residency at Johns Hopkins. Here in a graystone rowhouse in blue-collar East Baltimore lived Mr. Paul Stankowski, a retired Bethlehem Steel worker, and his wife Miriam. Mr. Stankowski, then in his 80s, was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, heart failure, and metastatic lung cancer. Dr. de Jonge was determined to keep his patient independently living at home as long as possible.
“At the time,” writes Northwell CEO Michael Dowling in his new book The Aging Revolution, “the nation’s hospitals were filled with patients like Mr. Stankowski, but a hospital was the last place he wanted to be. De Jonge’s mission was to treat what was treatable, while managing the symptoms of other conditions that were not curable, enabling Mr. Stankowski to remain at home.”
[1] Mark Mather, et al., “America’s Changing Population: What to Expect in the 2020 Census,” Population Bulletin 74, no. 1 (2019)
The Aging Revolution
now available!
ORDER NOW
While this program isn’t solely dedicated to older patients, the ability to be cared for in the place you feel most comfortable as you recover after an illness, injury, or accident, is paramount to older patients who want to stay out of the hospital. Home care services for cancer treatment, personalized rehabilitation services after joint replacement surgeries, diabetes management, heart failure treatment, stroke recovery, and hospice care are all available through the Health at Home program.
Northwell takes home care one step further, connecting patients with social workers to help patients with emotional, environmental and social needs. Patients who need a little extra help to remain independent at home receive it through Northwell’s Circle of Care program which provides dedicated and highly skilled aging life care specialists to help patients to continue to live independently. Circle of Care can provide safety assessments and recommendations for the home, scheduled visits for supportive counseling, assistance with bills, mail, household needs, and referrals to community resources.
“Looking to the future,” Dowling writes, “we are attracted by the age-friendly approach and the idea of what matters and how it can be a framework to fight ageism and promote person-centered care.”
And yet, Dowling acknowledges that challenges remain.
“We need to take more aggressive steps to make age-friendly care the nucleus of the doctor- patient relationship.”
As America ages, care in the home will continue to be an impactful differentiator in many patients’ quality of life. Northwell is committed to prioritizing what matters most to its patients while providing the expert care New Yorkers have come to expect from the state’s largest private healthcare system.
Learn more about the Independence at Home movement and how Northwell is fighting ageism in The Aging Revolution, available now to order.
Order New Book
Take Healthy Aging Quiz
If You’re Taking Care of a
Family Member, Don’t Go It
Alone.
If You’re Taking Care of a Family Member, Don’t Go It Alone.
There are an estimated 48 million family caregivers in the US as the responsibility to care for ill, disabled, and aging populations is falling on relatives and profoundly changing their day-to-day lives.
The Aging Revolution
now available!
ORDER NOW
Take Healthy Aging Quiz
Order New Book
HEALTHY AGING
With America Getting Older, Northwell Health Is Investing in Home Care
In the early evening on a fall day in 1992, Dr. Eric de Jonge stopped by the home of one of his favorite patients for a regular check-in, a last stop before heading home after another grueling day of his residency at Johns Hopkins. Here in a graystone rowhouse in blue-collar East Baltimore lived Mr. Paul Stankowski, a retired Bethlehem Steel worker, and his wife Miriam. Mr. Stankowski, then in his 80s, was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, heart failure, and metastatic lung cancer. Dr. de Jonge was determined to keep his patient independently living at home as long as possible.
“At the time,” writes Northwell CEO Michael Dowling in his new book The Aging Revolution, “the nation’s hospitals were filled with patients like Mr. Stankowski, but a hospital was the last place he wanted to be. De Jonge’s mission was to treat what was treatable, while managing the symptoms of other conditions that were not curable, enabling Mr. Stankowski to remain at home.”