One hospital has seen the growth in "elder care" and changed its strategic brand planning accordingly.
For example, the Children's Hospital in Baltimore, Md., - which began as a home for children with polio and other chronic diseases - now plans to change direction again and serve a different generation - the elderly.
Because Americans are not only aging but also living longer with multiple chronic illnesses - more and more people are going to need frequent and prolonged hospitalization with subsequent nursing home admission, said Robert Pierce, a healthcare consultant with New York-based Towers-Perrin, an international consulting firm.
"Now, the majority are treated at home and monitored through regular visits to the physician's office," he said. "This is going to be a new and steady market. Providers must manage complex cases while keeping a vigilant eye on economic realities."
Integrating elder care into existing programs can make for a good "bundled" care offering to managed care companies looking for providers that can handle a their enrollees' needs, said Scott Parkin, vice-president of communications for the American Association for Homes and Services For The Aging (Washington D.C.) during the Society For Heathcare Strategy and Market Development annual conference held recently in Atlanta.
"The key to the future of long-term care is the development of a comprehensive system of care and housing -- a seamless web," he said. "Offering a wide variety of home and community based services to the elderly will fill in the phenomenal growth we are experiencing."
Services such as chemotherapy and certain post-operative care traditionally provided in specialists' offices and hospitals can now be performed in a skilled nursing or convalescent center.
"Specialty units are creating a demand for providers who offer such services as pain management, chemotherapy, total parental feedings, and antibiotic and hydration therapy," Pierce said.
Children's Hospital saw the market opportunity. If all goes according to plan, the 86-year-old Children's hospital will open a 114-bed long-term care facility by 1997, and will build an assisted living home, adult day care facility and other types of care for the elderly on its 45-acre property during the next five years.
The survival of the hospital "all depends on what people want in the future, and I just believe that they want this," said Robert Chrzan, hospital spokesman.
The long-term care project is just one of the ways that the facility, known as Children's Hospital and Center for Reconstructive Surgery, plans to make a comeback after four years of losses and a dwindling occupancy rate in its 76-bedacute care unit.
The hospital lost $114,000 in 1991 and 1992, $1 million in 1993 and $1.7 million last year. During the fourth quarter of 1994 alone, the hospital lost $575,000.
That's partly because the hospital - which has marketed itself as an orthopedic specialty center - has no emergency room, so there are no urgent care cases to fill the beds.
Already, Children's attracts patients aged 65 and over with a focus on cardiac and orthopedic rehabilitation at its 4-year-old Bennett Institute, which includes a for-profit fitness center.
Healthier lifestyles iare the focus of a marketing campaign this fall called "Baltimore's Wellness Hospital."
(Children's 410/462-6800, Towers/Perrin 212/309-3400; American Association for Homes and The Aging, 202/783-2242)
Here are some of the color/emotion findings from Dr. Max Luscher, a Swiss psychologist who performed studies to show how color affects the human mind and body in many different ways.
- Bright red-orange: vital force, desire and action; impulsive and sexually driven.
- Bright yellow: intelligence, innovative, great hopes and expectations; happiness in enlightenment and perfection
- Blue-green: natural constancy, permanence, perseverance; security may be desired and change resisted.
- Dark blue: accomplishment, steadiness, order and condition of peace.
- Violet: "mystic" union in which dreams are made fact; sophistication and elegance along with pink.
- Brown: physical; security and conservatism; it is the least liked of colors.
- Grey: neutrality. It is neither subject nor object, neither inner nor outer, neither tension nor relaxation.