Technology and Long Term Care @HOME

by Louis on July 16, 2014

I read Seth Godin’s blog most days. This one is pointing right at us.

One key advantage of Long Term Care @HOME (used to be called Aging in Place) is managing service, product human and financial resources efficiently. As in Seth’s example below it is not about the trucks. It is about using the trucks VERY well. He even says coordinated…and though he does not mention ‘crossing silos’ it is clear the loads do not have to be from the same industry, the shippers just use the same cloud to get organized.

This is the unrealized technology potential for LTC@HOME. Building infrastructure/backbone is the opportunity. (like Amazon, Fed-EX, UBER, Air B&B and so many more)

The current wave of tech/health incubators, hackathons and investment interest is not going in this direction. The primary focus is apps and devices. And short cycles to quick ROI. But our long term care needs are substantial. They need system scale solutions…even to give value to the apps and devices.

Innovation wannabe entrepreneurs should understand the daily grind of on the ground humans providing service and the client’s life,…the context…the market…. before they lean startup their way.

LTL as a strategy

I confess I had to look it up.

A truck passed me on the highway and on the side, it said that they did both LTL and FTL shipments.

FTL means “full truckload.” For the longest time, a full truckload was the only efficient way to ship goods around. A company would expand operations (not just trucking, but just about everything) so that it could use all of an available resource. No sense having half a shipping clerk or half a secretary or half a truck shipment–the rest was going to go to waste, so might as well use it all.

As Lisa Gansky wrote about in her seminal book the Mesh, the massive shift in data (and knowledge) produced by the net means that FTL isn’t nearly the advantage over less than a truckload it used to be. Since it’s so cheap and effective to coordinate activity, that extra space isn’t wasted, not at all. It’s shared.

Since we can share resources, expanding to use all of something (a car, a boat, a vacation home) isn’t just inefficient, it’s wasteful.

Now that it’s cheaper and faster to share, an enormous number of new opportunities exist. Short runs, focused projects, marketing to the weird–mass is dead in more ways than we can count.

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: