The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with Homecare Homebase. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of home health, hospice care, senior housing, skilled nursing, and behavioral health. To see this year’s Future Leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.
Sarah Jacob, chief product officer at MedBridge, has been named a 2024 Future Leader by Home Health Care News.
To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40 years old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for seniors, and the committed professionals who ensure their wellbeing.
Jacob sat down with Home Health Care News to explain the importance of building and introducing technology products to the larger home-based care space that will keep providers on the cutting edge.
What drew you to this industry?
Very few things allow us to help people in their day-to-day lives. I love building products that solve problems, and to me, there’s no better reason to build products than for patients in the health care industry.
Home care, in specific, is lagging in terms of the technology available to patients and customers in this space. The industry has been wanting to evolve, and with rising costs getting in the way of growth, as well as payment models shifting, it’s time that great products become introduced in this space and play a major role.
What’s your biggest lesson learned since starting to work in this industry?
When I think about the patients we serve, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned while building products for this population is that they are much more like your typical consumer than I had anticipated.
When you think of the home care industry, you generally think of older patients, maybe patients less interested in technology and cutting edge innovation. This could not be further from the truth. The home care partners we serve want to better utilize AI, remote monitoring and on-the-go communication apps. Very similar to your typical consumer of innovative products.
If you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of home care, what would it be?
Collaboration between different technical solutions will become increasingly important. In order to really serve this market, it’s going to take several different solutions that talk to each other.
One area that I believe will be really important to focus on will be the caregiver space. With caregiver shortages within home care, different solutions will need to fill this role. This will require deep integration between valuable solutions so that the patient can be served holistically. We need to change the mindset around closed systems and become an industry of open systems and open integrations.
What do you foresee as being different about the home care industry looking ahead to 2025?
AI is going to play a large role in the future of the industry, particularly within high-impact technology solutions. This means tools to help reduce the cost of staff and supplies; tools to enable caregivers within home care; and tools to monitor patients as they are progressing through their care journey. These technologies are closer to us than we think.
In a word, how would you describe the future of home care?
Shifting.
What quality must all Future Leaders possess?
Future Leaders must be focused on growth. What growth opportunities exist for the home care industry, how can it expand and where can we find new revenue streams?
The answers to these questions will be the future of home care, and having a keen eye towards that will be a critical quality for Future Leaders.
To learn more about the Future Leaders program, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.