Podcast 126: Using Technology to Advance Care for an Aging Population, with Jon Warner

03:29 – 03:41 Jon Warner: “I quickly discovered that innovation and technology and entrepreneurship in health care are a lot of fun and there’s some really worthy issues and challenges to solve for.”

04:58 – 05:15 Jon Warner: “One area where capital is not as available, and it’s partly because the companies haven’t really got an investable value proposition, is in the aging tech space — meaning any technology or innovation that’s aimed at older adults.”

05:24 – 05:36 Jon Warner: “Silver Moonshot started about two and a half years ago as an attempt to bring more entrepreneurs and startups into the ecosystem that were willing to solve for problems of the older adult.”

09:22 – 09:38 John Marchica: “What’s been an example, Jon, of one of the more promising companies that you’ve seen that you say, ‘Hey, this is really a standout,’ that went through your program and that is maybe in market right now?”

12:12 – 12:28 John Warner: “I think this is interesting because we’re seeing individuals taking advantage of changes in the legislation, in particular, and policy and procedure in order to render their solutions, and I think we can see scale potential in all of them.” 

13:44 – 13:51 John Marchica: “Have you seen any technologies that are going to be able to address this issue [of the decreasing caregiver-support ratio]?”

14:32 – 14:56 John Warner: “I think we’ve seen a massive uptick in terms of millennials coming into this space; of that 45 million (professional caregivers], 10 million are millennials. … I think it gets us into intergenerational and multigenerational opportunities, and there are startups playing in that space to match those opportunities. Silvernest is one example, in Colorado.”

17:20 – 17:30 Jon Warner: “The trade is that both individuals are getting their needs met, with different value propositions, fundamentally. And several companies are in that space.”

18:45 – 19:14 Jon Warner: “I think sometimes we forget that, you know, we have many, many other places in the Western world and beyond that have different challenges from the ones that we have, but we’ve got the potential with the internet, in particular now, to collaborate and solve each other’s issues by doing so. … We’re seeing this already. I’m seeing care coaching, I’m seeing through telehealth and other areas an enormous amount of international cooperation going on that I didn’t see 10 years ago.”

20:12 – 20:26 Jon Warner: “Can we take clusters of individuals and track their health and look for commonality in terms of how we might intervene to help them to thrive, in sort of a healthy aging kind of a way?”

20:33 – 20:48 Jon Warner: “I think population health data is where you have to start. And I think that’s been really poor … but I think we don’t necessarily collect all of the data we need very well at all.”

27:54 – 28:06 Jon Warner: “I think we can, with the right approaches, get people to start to self-declare, understand those contextual factors and then make sure they’re presented so that as they come in, that data is on smart devices.”