Aging Forward: A New Path for Health, Technology, and Community

America has an aging challenge. As baby boomers enter advanced age, the shortfalls of our current care delivery systems are increasingly clear. If nothing changes, we are woefully unprepared for a world with more older adults than ever before. Aging Forward confronts this inconvenient reality and provides a life raft—a vision for the future with achievable solutions.

In this new era of human history, the leaders who will bring us safely to better shores are already among us—perhaps you are one. In this book, discover what will be needed for the journey. It begins with a deep look at how we got here—delving into the economic, political, and cultural forces that created America’s aging services model—and exposes the unsustainable trajectory of these services and policies given the state of health and aging today.

By focusing on the growing need to manage chronic health conditions versus waiting for medical crises, the authors explore how to restructure incentives, network communications, use data-driven solutions, and embrace existing and emerging technologies to reshape the infrastructure of aging care. The result: Better access to supports that will more easily—and economically—keep older adults safe, independent, and in their own communities for longer, avoiding the burdens and fears so many endure now.

The good news of Aging Forward is that “we are not bankrupt.” The solutions are all around us waiting to be applied. Yes, a radical change in every sector of society is needed—in government, public health, business, technology, urban planning, culture, community, family, and individuals—but this book shows it is possible. Examples of businesses and technologies performing successful transformations on very short timelines are occurring before our eyes. The tools we need are already available to us, but their enormous potential for caring for older people has barely been tapped.
 
Aging Forward illuminates the way to get started when the future of aging is now.

Raised in Ohio, David Dunkelman, M.S., J.D., expanded his experience by traveling around the world for a year after graduating from college. He visited 26 countries and three war zones, and observed many ways people live and die. He left the United States an angry young man and returned a patriot after seeing how so many other societies functioned. After graduating from Temple University School of Law, he helped his family’s apparel company grow to an organization distributing to 5,000 retailers nationally. The company closed when computers suddenly disrupted the nation’s centuries-old clothing supply chain, an ominous preview to what would also happen to aging in America.

Changing focus, Dunkelman earned a master’s degree from the Center for Studies in Aging at the University of North Texas, after which he eventually landed in Buffalo, New York, where for 30 years he was the founding President and CEO of The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Campus, one of the nation’s largest and most multifaceted campuses for older people. The campus was the first such organization to be named a winner of the national Peter F. Drucker Award for Innovation in Nonprofit Management.

Among his many individual awards are the Community Leadership Award from the Foundation for Jewish Philanthropies, Buffalo (2013), and the Dr. Evan Calkins Meritorious Service Award for “lifetime contributions to the field of aging,” presented by the Western New York Network in Aging, Inc. (2007).
Using creative problem-solving techniques developed at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Dunkelman has consulted nationally with more than 25 communities, helping them to develop strategic approaches to facility and programmatic design for older people. He writes and speaks about aging in America.

Martha Dunkelman, Ph.D., is a writer and editor who has written numerous articles, reviews, and brochures, as well as serving as book editor for an online periodical. She has also written and edited materials for the Educational Testing Service and the College Board. She credits her father, Dr. Maurice Levine, with teaching her to write in her teenage years, when she was not always the most willing student.

A graduate of Wellesley College, she later received a doctorate from New York University under the wise and kind guidance of H. W. Janson and spent many years in teaching and administration as a professor at Wright State University, the University at Buffalo, and Canisius College.

She learned about the care of older people from decades of bearing witness to the struggles and achievements of her husband David.