Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Damgaard, CEO of MatrixCare (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There’s stuff like that going on. There are venture-funded solutions that are going after that market also. From my point of view, the big trend that I see is that America never used to be a place where there was a lot of cheap labor available. I grew up in India. In India, the issue of elder care is much more manageable just because there’s such a large population of cheap labor available. It’s a society that is generally very community-oriented and very compassionate. People don’t throw their elders under the bus, basically.

John Damgaard: I understand. You’re exactly right. The reality is, if you rewind the time by 150 years in the US, here’s what healthcare looked like and senior care looked like. You had multiple generations living in very close proximity, often, on the same piece of land. We call them family farms. Who bore the burden of senior care? The family.

Grandma got sick and depending on where you live, maybe the guy with the topcoat and the bag would come to see her once in a blue moon. Effectively, the burden of care and the burden for the quality of life for grandma laid with the family. It was that way for hundreds of years and it’s still that way in much of the country. What has happened in the past 150 years? The reality is the family farm is a thing of the past. The population has moved away and become bifurcated by location and by occupation.

We go to the big cities. I’m in Minnesota. My sister is in London. My poor mother is back in Iowa. The challenge is we’ve created a distance dynamic. The opportunity is to overcome that distance dynamic and surround our loved ones. We just have to do it in a different way because we are not physically present but we certainly can be virtually present.

Sramana Mitra: That dynamic is certainly true about India as well. I was commenting more on the labor pool that can be tapped into and is being tapped into in India where families are not as locally available. America is now developing a very large labor pool that doesn’t have any jobs. It’s going to be more and more so as automation ravages society. Why not take care of elderly people?

John Damgaard: You do see some of that – unlicensed caregivers, the growth of private duty home care, and all those kinds of things. Those are growing areas and thankfully, we participate with our solutions in those areas. The reality is you still have the logistical challenges and you do have the disruptive challenges of the $15-an-hour minimum wage at Walmart that comes into play, no one’s really thought through the decimating impact it has on the senior care industry.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t understand.

John Damgaard: What that means is the frontline of caregivers in most senior living is provided by these low-cost unlicensed workers. When you have a disruption in the wage scale like a big acceleration on the minimum wage, it would create enormous disruption to the ability to provide facility-based and home-based care.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: John Damgaard, CEO of MatrixCare
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