This week, we tip our cap to Dr. Allan “Chip” Teel and his effort to provide at home care for elderly residents too healthy to need full-time nursing care and too infirm to live completely on their own.
By applying a couple of dollars, some existing technology and a little creative thinking, Dr. Teel has managed to create a lower cost alternative to the traditional assisted living approach.
With all due respect to our local assisted living facilities, which provide an invaluable service to the clients they serve, Teel’s brainchild, Elder Power, creates the possibility of keeping patients in their own homes longer, saving money and precious bed space for others who may have more need.
What is truly sad, as Dr. Teel states in this week’s front page article, is that, despite the lip service, there are vested interests in the way the current house of healthcare cards is built that do not support lowering costs.
Lowering costs really means less money in the system and less money in the system simply means there is less to go around, which eventually equals lower profits for someone, whether or not it delivers a better product for the consumers.
It may be, as Teel’s anonymous critics point out, there are some bugs in his concept and some concerns that need to be addressed, but on its face, Dr. Teel’s company seems like a development that will lower costs and improve the standard of care for certain patients.
Financial consequences aside, we think Dr. Teel is onto something.
As Joe Gelarden’s story so painstakingly points out, a look at the numbers tells us the way we’re doing business now is unsustainable. We are going to have to change something and we embrace the lets-start-now-before-it’s-really-too-late philosophy and we are already late in the game.
This is the way to go. It is creative approaches such as Dr. Teel’s that will get us out of this mess we are in, in the long run.
We can’t depend on the government to save us, but we can do what we can do, and buying a computer program that already exists to serve a client base that already has a bed at home, and who can be happily served right where they are, is the way to go.
