For years, America has talked about the aging population as a problem we will need to solve somewhere down the road. That framing is outdated. The crisis is already here.
The population of older adults grew 13% between 2020 and 2024, far faster than the working-age population. There are over 61 million older adults in the United States. By 2030, every Baby Boomer will be at least 65 years old.
After decades in healthcare, I have seen how quickly demographic trends become realities for patients, families, and healthcare organizations. The question is no longer whether America will need more elder care. It is whether our healthcare system can scale to meet that demand without relying on a model that is increasingly fragmented and difficult for patients and families to navigate.
Technology will not solve the elder-care crisis by itself. But without technology, I don’t believe we can solve it at the scale America will require.
An older adult’s healthcare journey rarely fits neatly into one organization. A person may move from a primary care physician to a hospital, then to rehabilitation, skilled nursing, home health, and eventually community-based services. Along the way, information can become fragmented, responsibilities can shift, and families can find themselves trying to coordinate a system they were never trained to navigate.
Healthcare has always required coordination, but many of the systems connecting different parts of the continuum were not designed for the volume and complexity of today’s aging population. We have built sophisticated individual components without always building the connective tissue between them.
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