Imagine a nursing home furnished with day beds. At night, residents would sleep in them, but during the day, they’d be folded up as couches, turning bedrooms into living rooms. A small change that could make a huge difference in elders’ daily experience.
Or think about what computers could do in a nursing home. How they could connect the residents with the outside world, expand their horizons, enrich their lives.
And that’s just a sliver of the conversations now taking place at Tockwotton Home, which, through a new partnership with the Business Innovation Factory, Quality Partners of Rhode Island and the MIT AgeLab, is being turned into “a real-world laboratory” for elder care.
Established in 1856, Tockwotton Home, in Providence, is the oldest nursing home in Rhode Island and one of the oldest in the nation, according to executive director Kevin McKay.
But in recent years, as the “culture change” movement has taken hold in the industry, the nonprofit 42-bed nursing home and 30-bed assisted-living residence has been working to modernize and reinvent itself. It’s also preparing to move from its historic Fox Point facility to a new, 150-bed facility on the East Providence waterfront, slated to open in 2010.
The new project, however, dubbed the “Nursing Home of the Future,” takes the quest for innovation to a higher level, bringing Tockwotton’s staff together with creative minds not only in its own industry, but in business, technology and academia.
“I’m excited about it, because it brings in the expertise of folks who do these kinds of things all the time,” McKay said in a recent interview. “You put two or three different heads together and different approaches, and who knows what we can come up with?”
The project will begin by analyzing the current experience of nursing home and assisted-living residents, identify unmet needs, identify and prioritize “target opportunities,” look at new architectural designs for patient units, and get input from a range of people. Some video cameras may also be set up, McKay said, to document daily life at Tockwotton.
Construction on the East Providence facility is slated to begin this fall, but McKay said the BIF project could still help shape the interior design.
As it is, a patient unit and common living areas will be devoted to the initiative, providing an opportunity for the project partners to design a new kind of living space, conduct research and try innovative approaches in care delivery.
The project will leverage the BIF Experience Lab platform as well as the expertise of Quality Partners of Rhode Island, which has been the federally designated National Nursing Home Quality Improvement Organization Support Center since 2002.
Dr. Stefan Gravenstein of Quality Partners, a nationally renowned geriatrician and professor at Brown University with extensive experience related to the design, development and implementation of nursing home quality initiatives, will serve as clinical director.
Gravenstein has already served as medical director for Tockwotton since October, and McKay credits him with bringing this project to the facility.
BIF has set up a national advisory group to assist with the endeavor, including Joe Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab; Dr. Richard Besdine, director of the Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research at Brown University; and Scott Williams, chief marketing officer of Morgans Hotel Group.
“The Nursing Home of the Future initiative will enable us to quickly and cost effectively test big-win solutions in a manageable environment and then to scale those ideas nationally,” said BIF founder Saul Kaplan, who is also executive director of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation. •
