On the TechTO stage ×2
The future of aging with dignity | Zayna Khayat of Saint Elizabeth Healthcare
Watch on YouTube ↗Health tech + COVID19 | Zayna Khayat (Future Strategist at SE Health) June 2020
Watch on YouTube ↗First seen on a TechTO stage in 2018. Every TechTO talk is searchable — ask the archive about Zayna ↗
In their words
The future of health care is the home — the home-spital. We're going to look back at hospitals and they're going to be like retail bank outlets, or Flight Centre.
Diapers, baby food, McDonald's, suburbs — none of those existed until the baby boomers aged into them. So what's coming? That's what we're here to build: Canada's number one aging company.
Restructure the system so that we can control the next normal, and create an experience of care that's 21st century and meets our patients and families and our clinicians in the communication channels and the place they want to be — and that's the home.
Quick answers
What is SE Health (Saint Elizabeth)?
A 110-year-old Canadian home-care organization — not a hospital, as Khayat liked to clarify — where she previously served as Future Strategist. It began with four people doing midwifery and has grown to 10,000 people visiting 20,000 Canadian homes a day, helping people live and age at the home of their choice, with a focus on seniors.
What did Zayna Khayat's futures team at SE Health work on?
Horizon-two-and-three innovation for the older adult population, across six areas: new villages and communities where older people could thrive (including dementia villages); smart homes for aging, with about ten experiments underway at the time; reinventing home care's paid-per-visit business model; caregivers, via a consumer business called Elizz with an insurance product sold to employers; reimagining dying; and building a workforce ready for an aging population. She described roughly 20 projects in the pipeline.
How did she say COVID-19 changed health innovation?
She framed COVID as a composite of past crises — world wars, 9/11, SARS (which she credits with birthing Alibaba and e-commerce), the financial crisis and the gig economy it spawned — and said it amplified the three forces already pulling health care to the future: patients, a broken supply-demand business model, and new technology. The ten barriers to health innovation she has taught a university course about were smashed, and other sectors became health-care businesses overnight. Her warning: if we just let things go back, we'll end up mostly where we were.