Our Beloved Admission Director at Regency Grande in Dover NJ, Carla Holton, just shared this story with me!

Hi Judah. 

"Just wanted  to share a cute story  about our cute little teddy bears.   I attended a health fair at one of our adult community’s , Fox Hills  in Rockaway , N.J. on  June 26^th.  As you can see in the photo’s I took along several of our teddy bears.   The community there love them for their grandchildren , self etc.    One gentlemen happen to come by and took a teddy bear.  I said oh is that for your grandchild. He and his wife said no and explained that he had just had surgery with a defibrillator inserted and that he was going to use this teddy bear  under his seat belt to protect it from getting damaged in case of and accident.  HE said it was the perfect size.  It actually looks like a hug.     So not only is our bear there to comfort it is there to protect.  I though that was such a great idea."

Carla Holton, Regency Grande

FitBits, telehealth, remote data gathering—those wireless and mobile tech capabilities are all right here, right now. But what to do with all those data? It must start with a robust information technology architecture that can handle the new data influx that is coming and still deal with quality care, says John Derr, president of JD and Associates Enterprises.

Although wearable technology has been around for several years, it reached the general consumer level in 2014 and took off like a rocket. Today’s wearables can count heartbeats, measure blood pressure, check glucose levels and track locations. But the wearable frenzy boils down to the same problems healthcare has had with its data for decades: Just because we can capture data elements doesn’t mean they’re translatable to our health record systems, and just because we can translate the data into a “permanent” record system doesn’t always mean we have efficient ways to use or analyze them for better benchmarking or quality care.

All new healthcare technology goes through a “whistles and bells” period, then often settles into actual, valuable applications that can improve healthcare delivery in the mainstream. Although many providers hail the adoption of this type of technology as a huge milestone in patient engagement if nothing else, others are looking toward wearables as potential goldmines of data on residents as they live their daily lives, filling in the crucial gaps between physician visits.

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