Your Home Could Soon Keep You Safer. Here's How.

A new healthcare initiative launching this month could finally make aging at home safer, smarter, and covered by Medicare.

Right now, you face a problem nobody likes to talk about. You want to stay in your own home as you age, but the healthcare system isn’t set up to help you do that safely. About 75% to 90% of Americans over 50 want to age at home, yet many identify it as their greatest health risk because they’re doing it alone, without support.​

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Falls cost about $50 billion annually in medical expenses, with one out of five causing serious injuries like broken bones or head trauma. People forget medications, stop eating regularly, or show early signs of dementia, and nobody notices until there’s an emergency requiring a hospital visit averaging $30,000.​

But something significant just happened in early November 2025 that could change this. The Digital Medicine Society launched the Aging in Place Initiative, bringing together over 20 healthcare systems, home health agencies, and technology companies to create a blueprint for keeping you safely at home using connected health monitoring.​

This isn’t another study. It’s hospitals, insurance companies, and tech vendors working together to solve the money and coordination problems that have kept helpful technology from reaching you.​

The Real Problem Getting Solved

Think about what happens when something goes wrong at home. Maybe you fall in the bathroom at 2 a.m. Maybe you stop taking your medications correctly. Maybe you’re showing early signs of cognitive decline but nobody notices the pattern until it becomes a crisis.​

Right now, these problems go undetected until they become emergencies. By then, you’re in an ambulance heading to the ER. Meanwhile, 78% of Americans over 55 have a chronic condition requiring ongoing management, and two out of three will experience some cognitive decline by age 70. You’re managing this largely on your own.​

The technology this initiative is organizing around can spot problems early. Motion sensors in your bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen detect if you’re moving differently or spending unusual time in certain rooms. A sensor under your mattress tracks sleep patterns. A contact on your medicine cabinet knows if you forgot your pills.​

This isn’t someone watching you on camera. It’s passive monitoring that notices deviations from your normal routine and alerts someone who can check in before a small problem becomes a big one.​

Why This Matters Right Now

The timing is finally right for this to actually work. In May 2025, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued a Request for Information specifically about how technology can improve care for Medicare beneficiaries. That’s the federal government signaling they’re ready to pay for solutions.​

Jennifer Goldsack, DiMe’s CEO, was blunt about the urgency: “We’re going to see an enormous wave of folks aging into Medicare, and the reality is that the majority of existing Medicare beneficiaries and soon to be Medicare beneficiaries do want to age in their own home, and yet the system is not optimized to do that”.​

By 2040, one in five Americans will be over 65. If the healthcare system doesn’t figure this out now, many older people will end up in nursing facilities costing $131,583 per year simply because they can’t be safely supported at home. That’s neither financially sustainable nor what people want.​

What You’ll Actually See

By mid-2026, DiMe expects to deliver industry playbooks outlining best practices for how each part of the healthcare system should handle technology-enabled aging at home. Think of it as an instruction manual for doctors, home health agencies, insurance companies, and tech vendors.​

They’re also creating policy and funding guidelines recommending how Medicare and private insurance should pay for these services. Right now, reimbursement is a mess, which is why many promising technologies never scale beyond pilot programs.​

The project focuses on practical challenges you might face: managing chronic diseases like diabetes or heart failure at home, supporting people with dementia, and making sure you don’t end up back in the hospital three days after being discharged.​

Partners include Epic (the electronic health records system most hospitals use), UMass Memorial Health, home health agencies like BAYADA and Enhabit, and technology companies like Validic and Withings. This isn’t a startup hoping to disrupt healthcare. It’s the actual healthcare system reorganizing itself.​

How This Actually Affects You

Let’s get specific about what changes. Right now, if you wanted monitoring in your home, you’d face several problems. Your doctor probably wouldn’t know which systems to recommend. Medicare might not cover it. Even if you paid out of pocket, the data from your devices wouldn’t connect to your medical records, so nobody would monitor it effectively.​

DiMe’s initiative aims to solve all three problems. The playbooks will tell doctors which technologies work and how to integrate them. The policy recommendations will push for Medicare coverage. The technical standards will ensure your devices talk to your healthcare providers’ systems.​

You’d still live independently in your own home. But if you started shuffling your feet differently (an early fall risk indicator), stopped cooking regular meals (a possible cognitive decline sign), or had disrupted sleep patterns (linked to multiple health issues), someone would notice and reach out.​

Currently, 85% of seniors planning to stay home don’t believe they’ll need significant modifications, and about one in five haven’t even thought about what they might need. This initiative addresses that gap by making monitoring part of standard medical care rather than something you have to figure out yourself.​

Will This Actually Happen

Here’s the honest answer: no initiative is guaranteed to succeed. But this one has better odds because it’s addressing the money problem head-on. The AgeTech market is projected to exceed $120 billion by 2030, yet most companies struggle to scale because reimbursement pathways don’t exist.​

What makes this different is that DiMe brought together the people who actually have to make the system work: hospitals that treat you, home health nurses who visit you, insurance companies that pay bills, and tech companies that build devices. They’re not working in isolation hoping someone else figures out payment later.​

Goldsack noted that technology “has been developed in a complete vacuum from the actual patient journey, from the workforce needs, from reimbursement considerations, and from emerging new categories of technology, like smart home technologies”. This project exists specifically to fix that fragmentation.​

The federal government’s timing matters too. When CMS issues a Request for Information about health technology, it’s usually followed by policy changes and payment models within 18 to 24 months. That creates a real window for these solutions to become standard Medicare benefits rather than experimental programs.​

What Happens Next

Between now and mid-2026, these partner organizations are working on practical details: what good monitoring looks like for someone with congestive heart failure versus someone with early dementia, how home health nurses should use the data, what doctors need to see and when, how much it should cost, and how to prove it saves money by preventing hospitalizations.​

They’re also developing case studies showing early successes. Some of these health systems are already piloting programs and will document what worked, what didn’t, and how they made it financially sustainable.​

For you, the practical implication is this: if you’re in your 50s or 60s now, by the time you’re facing decisions about whether you can safely stay home, there should be clear, Medicare-covered options involving connected health monitoring. Not vague possibilities. Actual services with proven track records that your doctor can prescribe and insurance will pay for.​

That’s the difference between aging in place by default (risky, isolating, often ending badly) and aging in place by design (supported, monitored, sustainable). The technology exists. The initiative is about making it accessible, affordable, and integrated into actual medical care rather than something only tech-savvy people with money can access.​

Worth paying attention to? Yes. This is infrastructure being built for your future, and it’s happening right now.