GrandCare’s founding member and VP of Business Development, Laura Mitchell, gave a talk for nursing students at Moraine Park Technical College. The subject of her presentation was “Disruptive Technologies in Aging and Healthcare.” Both GrandCare and Moraine Park are located in West Bend, a city of 30,000 people in Southeastern Wisconsin.

Laura discussed the disruptive demographic of the “aging tsunami,” caused by baby boomers reaching retirement age, exacerbated by the rising cost of health care. That’s where technologies like GrandCare can help, by facilitating remote patient monitoring, providing secure video chat and medication management.

It was the last day of the nursing students’ first semester of study at Moraine Park Tech. “It’s encouraging how receptive and inspired these future clinical providers were with the presence of telehealth and telemedicine technologies,” Laura said. “Especially considering that technology will play a large role in the delivery of personalized, predictive and proactive care.”

These young, engaged students are a new generation of clinical caregivers. They aren’t afraid of technology. They expect it. Their older counterparts can often seem more cautious and less accepting of advanced technologies. When shown GrandCare, the Moraine Park Tech students immediately began to get excited and brainstorm implementation strategies.

Laura, who speaks all over the country on connected health, digital caregiving and aging, doesn’t usually get the luxury of working with organizations in her own back yard. “I love that we’re engaging local people and local organizations,” she said. “Innovation doesn’t need to happen only in Silicon Valley. We can obviously benefit greatly from technology interventions, especially here in the Midwest.”