Improving Healthcare Accessibility for Vulnerable Elderly Populations

In your twenties and thirties, you can often go years without seeing a doctor and experience no consequences at all from it. That changes as you get older. Elderly patients are routinely in and out of doctor’s offices, both to receive preventative care and manage chronic conditions that develop with age.

And yet, receiving these necessary services is not always easy. “Accessibility” is a big buzzword in American healthcare. How easy is it to get these services that people need? Often, not easy enough. In this article, we will take a look at what accessibility issues face elderly populations, and what can be done about it.

Financial Restrictions

Truly elderly populations do have the benefit of Medicare. This means that they will not need to worry about being uninsured after they retire. However, they will be on a fixed income, and their insurance certainly will not prevent them from incurring out-of-pocket costs.

Health-related expenses go up significantly as people age, with the majority of total lifetime costs taking place in the final few years of life for most people.

Couple this with societal factors that are influencing many people’s post-employment finances—retirement ages continue to climb up, retirement savings are leveling out or declining in many parts of the country—and a clear problem emerges. How can people on a fixed income afford the expensive healthcare that they require?

This, of course, is the billion-dollar question—one that no one has come up with an adequate answer for. Legislative action will be required for a scalable, national solution. Locally, many communities have managed to raise funds to create affordable clinics and healthcare options that are more accessible to people with limited means. Social workers and activists also routinely advocate for improving the financial accessibility of healthcare, both in local communities and throughout the nation.

For the most part, however, the issue of financial accessibility is ongoing.

Transportation

Then there is the problem of transportation. It’s ironic, in a way: People who need to get to lots of doctor’s appointments are often not mobile enough to make it happen. Maybe they are physically unable to get out of the house several times a week for appointments. Maybe they lack the means. No car, and no one to drive them.

This problem is very common, but also easy to solve. Many hospitals and clinics provide shuttle services for patients who cannot make it to the doctor’s office on their own. These services are an easy way to make sure that vulnerable patients are making it to all of their appointments on time.

Lack of Options

This is an issue that many people—not just members of the elderly population experience. For the most important choices, you will ideally want to explore multiple options and weigh the pros and cons of each. If there is only one physician in your area capable of administering the care you need, that effectively eliminates your ability to choose.

Sometimes, healthcare options are narrowed artificially by insurance companies. Maybe the elderly patient lives in an area where there are many people who provide the care that they need. However, their insurance is only willing or able to cover one specific provider.

This lack of options can be very frustrating to people who want to have as much control over their healthcare as possible but lack the means to take charge of the situation.

This, unfortunately, is another issue for which there is not an easy solution. Some people have managed to expand their care options by continuously advocating for themselves with their insurance companies. This may work in areas where there are many providers. In communities where options truly are limited, there are no easy solutions.

Telehealth for the Win?

Telehealth services allow patients to contact their physicians remotely. Through text or video-based communications, they can have basic questions answered. They can also receive detailed insights into their health without ever leaving the house when telehealth services are coupled with wearable healthcare technology.

For example, heart or blood pressure monitors can now provide doctors with real-time updates on their patient's health. No one needs to leave the house, and the information is just as up-to-date as it would be if the patient was admitted to the hospital. This is naturally a great way to catch issues before they become major problems.

It also gives patients more control over their own care. Where previously, the patients knew only what they were told, now they can view the exact same information as the doctors who are treating them. Constant data points are taken through wearable devices and the patient can view them easily through electronic health records.

While this unprecedented level of accessibility has resulted in heightened levels of paranoid Google searches, it has also given people much more control over their own health.

Telehealth services provide a workable solution to many of the issues described above. They are:

• Affordable: Quick questions are usually free. More in-depth communication should still cost less than an office visit and may be covered entirely by insurance.
• Easy: You don’t have to get in your car and go to the doctor’s office. Questions may not be answered in real-time—making telehealth useless in the case of an emergency—but they are usually handled conveniently within 24 hours.
• Versatile: Remote communication theoretically means that you are no longer limited to insights from doctors within driving distance of your house. Healthcare professionals can collaborate remotely through digital records in a way that was not previously possible, making it easier for patients to receive a robust set of opinions.

Telehealth services are not a perfect solution. They are not comprehensive enough to meet all of an elderly patient’s needs. They also may come with their own set of accessibility problems. For example, many older patients may have issues accessing or effectively using digital technology. The “digital divide,” as it is sometimes called, shrinks every day but remains a real issue for people who are uncomfortable using computers to manage their health.

Still, in a world where healthcare is often hard to access, digital technology has the potential to increase options and give elderly patients more autonomy.