A Visionary Redefines Aging and Retirement

Anti-Aging Psychologist Dr. Michael Brickey Interviews
Erickson Retirement Communities Founder and CEO John Erickson

initially aired in June 2008 on www.webtalkradio.net;   
MP3 and and show summary are at: www.agelesslifestyles.com

[Music]

MB: This is Dr. Michael Brickey with Ageless Lifestyles Radio, cutting-edge thinking for being youthful at every age. On each program, I interview experts on what it takes to live longer, healthier, and happier. Our program takes a holistic approach in addressing anti-aging psychology, medicine, alternative medicine, fitness, nutrition, and wellness. Our emphasis is on innovative thinking and practices that have solid data and results.  

John Erickson is a visionary who decided to reinvent aging and retirement. He turned an abandoned college campus in Maryland into a vibrant retirement community. Now Erickson has 20 communities, serving more than 20,000 residents. The monthly Erickson Tribune newspaper has three million hard copies an issue, in addition to being online. Unhappy with what television offers seniors, Mr. Erickson invested a $100 million in developing his own television network, Retirement Living TV. Finally, the Erickson Foundation established the School of Aging Studies at the University of Maryland and funds programs in the public schools. In the first part of the show, we’ll learn about John Erickson’s vision for how to live and age better. In the second part, we’ll focus on how he plans to use television, print, and the Internet to help us live and age better. Mr. Erickson, I’m delighted to have you join us. 

JE: Well, I’m glad to be here this morning.

MB: Of all the pursuits that you could’ve chosen, how did you come to devote your life to changing the way people age?

JE: I was actually involved in the leisure housing market in Florida in the early ‘70s and I got to see how exciting it was for people to come down and the difference that they experienced in their social framework by being together with people like themselves. And I was thinking that for every one person who went to Florida, 20 stayed home. And so if you move them out in the aging cycle just ten or so years, you’re now into what I call the maintenance phase of aging, and the ability to do that in a social environment is much more powerful and successful than it is to do it in the isolation of your home. So I decided to take the combination of that leisure housing and social experience and see if I could make that work for the later half of the retirement years for people that had stayed home. And that’s when I started this college conversion in Baltimore 25 years ago.

MB: Now, what do you mean by “the maintenance phase?” 

JE: I divided retirement into two phases. There’s the itch phase, when you’ve just gotten out of your work life and you decide, “I’m going to go scratch some itches that I’ve always wanted to get to,” and whether it’s cruising or golf or travel or whatever. And you say, “All right, I’m going to go explore all these things.” And then the last half of retirement is the maintenance phase. Aging does create some complexities and it requires a lot more energy that we used to think it did to successfully make the last half of retirement work well. Twenty years ago, the common thought was that – don’t overdo it, take it easy. And we found out that was totally wrong. Use it or lose it is the reality.

MB: Back in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, the Normalization Movement was developed in the Scandinavian countries, and the idea was to get people with disabilities or seniors to live a more normal lifestyle. Erickson sounds like a Scandinavian name. Did the Normalization Movement have much influence on your?

JE: No, I have a good Norwegian name, but it was enough generations removed, I haven’t really had any association with – I did visit Norway about ten years ago. That was a fun thing. But no, it was really one of these entrepreneurial designs that I just came up with. The theory was right about the socialization. And then, once you started gathering people together, you had to figure out, “And what else do they need besides a dining room and a card room?” Because they needed a lot more. And that’s when we just started saying, “Okay, I’ve got a group of people here that are willing to tell us what they need and what they want, and let’s see what we can package together over the next 25 years.”

MB: How did you come to choose an abandoned college campus?

JE: I’d been in development in Florida for a number of years and so I knew a little bit about sites. I was visiting Catholic University, where I had gone to school about 15 years earlier, and one of the priests there was telling me about this abandoned college in Baltimore, and it had been empty for four years. So I skipped my airplane at National Airport to go back to Florida and drove to Baltimore to look at this abandoned college. And I thought, you know, if there was ever a concept that this would be a great spot to test this social theory – turn of the century empty buildings. They were all colonnaded, big concrete structures, so there were no interior bearing walls – I could tell that from walking through them. And I thought, “Okay, this is my chance. I’ve got to take the opportunity and see what I can do with it.”

MB: So how much did that influence you to have subsequent communities have a campus feel to them?

JE: 100%. Now, I didn’t know much about the service end of the retirement business and I had to deal with the big college buildings in the first place, so I renovated those. And then I had the same theory that the rest of the industry had, that people really want to live in cottages scattered out on the fields where they can park their car and unload their groceries. If you took a focus group, that’s what they would tell you. But the first hundred and some people that moved in, they wouldn’t have been served by living in cottages in the field. They wouldn’t come in on snowy, nasty days, on super-hot days, rainy days. They wouldn’t sign up for bridge games. So I thought, “I’m going to abandon this cottage concept and keep adding on an indoor university living experience.” The rest of the industry said, there’s a certain size that if you go beyond that, it’s like an atomic reactor out of control and you’ll lose everything. And so I said, “Well, okay.” The theory was so dominant that for a while I thought about separating the community and starting all over at the other end of the campus. And then I realized that would cost a whole lot of money to start all over with brand new community spaces and the rest. So greed overcame me and I just decided to keep adding on. Found out an interesting dynamic – that the bigger the community, the more exponential was the growth of activities, involvements. It wasn’t at all like the atomic reactor out of control. It actually was much more sustainable, the bigger you made it.

MB: Yeah, if you have several dozen people, that’s not a critical mass to have a class in computers or art or something like that, but you get a few hundred or even more, then you can have a course in just about anything.

JE: Right. And at 200 people, you might get three courses, but at 2,000 people, you’ll get 18 to 20 courses. And that’s what we found. And their interest of study, their interest of hobbies, of involvement, community activities, exponentially grew when you added on in size. And so my theory today is that there probably is no limit to how big you could build a retirement community, other than you need to have the space to do it near a large city. It’s hard to make people move away from where they are and where their adult children and grandchildren are and go someplace else. So you need to be near the larger cities to make this really work. Like we’ve got a 3,000-unit community in Silver Spring and it works beautifully.

MB: That’s the same theory some of our college campuses have. Ohio State, just a few miles from me, is 50,000 people now.

JE: That’s correct. In fact, I hope to get some of those alumni over at our place in Columbus.

MB: Yes. I have a good friend that’s already enrolled in—

JE: At Hilliard there?

MB: Yes.

JE: Yeah. One of our campuses is very near the College Park campus of the University of Maryland. And it’s almost like we’re their alumni center. May as well fly the flag of the university. And it’s great because our residents go to their fine arts facilities and are in large attendance at many, many of the events at the university.

MB: We have this idea in our culture that, “A man’s home is his castle; I’m going to defend it until my dying breath,” or “If we go to a retirement community, at least give me a little cottage that’s a little scaled-down version of my home.” How do you get people to make the transition to, “Well, I would be happier in a community with other people and more things to do.”

JE: Dr. Brickey, this is where we have a serious problem in America. We give people really, really bad information about aging. The reality is the single-family home is probably the single biggest killer of the elderly in our country today, because, number one, it isolates people as their neighborhoods change around them. Number two, people try to drive from their suburban environment way too long and that’s a recipe for a bad accident. They try to drive in their suburban environments after dark when they know they can’t see well. They’re sitting in a place that was designed for raising families, with 35 cubic foot refrigerators and SUVs and humongous grocery stores, and all of the sudden you’re down to two people living in a house that’s oversized. And then the thing that causes even more damage is the unrealistic attitude about how well you can maintain the house. And so you have guys still climbing on ladders to clean their gutters, and inevitably, between snow, ice, ladders, there’s going to be an accident. It finally overcomes you. And the concept of hanging on to this castle because it has memories deludes people into believing that memories are more valuable than experiences. What really happens is they wind down – just the same as you quit exercising, is you quit the social structure – you have atrophy. And that atrophy leads to depression and that’s what kills people, more than the disease. You can defer the disease issues with good management for many, many years. But if you don’t have a sustainable social structure and an environment that gives you the dignity that you want to feel inside, and if that’s trapped to how far you can drive in your car or how many contacts you can make in a week, it just is not sustainable. So that’s why I think we give the senior market in America all the wrong information.

MB: I think you just gave us some hints as to why you want your own television network and why you print three million copies of the Erickson Tribune, but let’s get back to that later. You chose the word “retirement” – retirement communities, Retirement Living TV. A lot of people think of retirement as slowing down, downscaling everything. For some people it has a negative image. Why did you choose to use “retirement?”

JE: First off, I found out that people who are retired don’t look at it as negatively as people who aren’t. People that aren’t have a fearful attitude towards retirement like, “It might be the end. What would that mean?” This comes out of the American culture--this youth culture that fixates on no wrinkles and staying young and advertising to 19 to 34-year-olds. And then we have the second piece of our culture that says, “We will only value you relative to what you’re worth.” And we measure that two ways – what’s your title and how much money do you make? And so when you’re retired, you drop your title and you’ve limited the amount you make to be worth anything. That concept permeates society. And so what I’m trying to do is change that dynamic. So I want people to start thinking of retirement as the next major phase of your life. I call it the “freedom years.” You’ve now been through your education years, you’ve been through your family years, you’ve been through your career years, you’ve been through your accumulation years. And now you can go to your freedom years. And this is when you have the ability to express what you lived your life for. And that’s what I see--retirement really turning from the negative to the positive. And that’s the message I’m trying to get across.

MB: And I see it as a time of renewal, too.

JE: That’s right. A huge time for renewal, and a fun time. Gosh knows, the accumulation years and the family raising years and the career years are the hard years. Let’s go to the fun years now.

MB: I noticed your literature doesn’t use the word “seniors” very often. Was that intentional?

JE: Yeah, it’s funny – because of this negative ageism bias that we have in our country, there’s almost no word you can use that people will like. They don’t like to be called old, they don’t like to be called senior, they don’t like to be called retired. Society really has a deep ageism bias. And so it kind of insults everybody that’s reached this stage of their life. And the thing that kind of irritates me about it is that that was fine when that phase of life was two years or three years. But that phase of life is 25 years. And we’re talking about 80 million Americans being in the retirement years here, and we’re not going to talk about the next 25 years of their life? Well, that’s ridiculous. So that’s why I have this big push on to say let’s add dignity and value to those 25 years, and let’s give good advice during those 25 years.

MB: There are quite a few very upscale retirement communities for people who are financially well-heeled. One of the remarkable things you did was to make retirement communities that are affordable for the middle class. How were you able to financially make that work?

JE: Middle America has enough equity value in their homes and enough Social Security and pension income, that if I can put the finance structure together to bridge the development of the community, I can get anybody that’s ever owned a single-family home and has their Social Security and pension money into a retirement community. And with the 100% refundable insurance deposits, people are transferring their home equity – which, by the way, has grown dramatically in the last 15 years. And so that home equity is a huge resource. And by making that 100% refundable, middle America says, “Sure, it’s time for me to get out of the house. I’ll deposit a part of my home equity in your retirement community as long as you promise to give it back to my grandkids for their college education.” In scale and size of where we are, we can put a monthly fee structure together that’s cheaper than living at home.

MB: So the 100% refundable means not only can you change your mind, but that your children inherit the equity that their parents put in it?

JE: That’s correct.

MB: Wow.

JE: And that makes it attractive. Sixty-five percent of senior Americans have enough home equity and pension and Social Security to move into a retirement community like that. The bottom 35%, there’s some low equity housing owners that probably lived closer to the inner city, didn’t get as much equity, and there’s a rental housing market that never grew equity, and then there’s also a subsidy market in the bottom 35%. But you can get every bit of 65% of all seniors in America with that program. That’s a huge market.

MB: Yeah. So what do you see as unique about life in an Erickson community

JE: Number one is the totally contained two or three million square feet of indoor space makes it so that you can have a perfect lifestyle and you don’t care whether it’s snowing outside or whether it’s 102 degrees outside. Your bridge game is just as much fun and your involvements in the woodwork shop and you’re taking classes and working with the church – all of those things – it’s a large, indoor, city-like university. And then what we specialized in over the last 25 years is figuring out what are the key points that would create more successful aging? And we started – the first campus was an old college seminary, and so there was a beautiful marble turn-of-the-century church on the corner. So I went down to the community and found a part-time minister that would do a Protestant service, and I found a priest that would come up and say Mass. And the next thing I know, there’s a thousand parishioners in the Catholic parish and the cardinals brought it into the archdiocese. There was 800 people in the Protestant community. And just by having an empty building on the corner, you realized how much faith means to people in aging. And so now when I build campuses, we always build a large interfaith chapel. And the cardinal in Washington assigned a priest, the Jewish community assigned a rabbi, and there was probably six other ministers competing, and they have an area council that works on what time services are, and it’s a great innovation. Well, that was one. The second probably biggest change was the concept of transportation. When people shouldn’t be driving, we have to have an alternative, so a robust transportation system to shopping centers and doctors’ offices, and even fun trips to Branson, Missouri, and to Atlantic City for gambling – you need a robust transportation system. But probably the biggest difference that distinguishes us was the fact that 20 years ago, I realized the biggest deficiency in aging is America’s healthcare system. It’s just not designed for 80-yaer-olds to manage their healthcare.

MB: So you came up with Erickson Advantage. How does that work?

JE: It started as an Erickson health concept. The biggest failure that I saw was that our system reimburses a doctor for about ten minutes of time when they see an 80-year-old. And so the primary doctors are nothing but booking agents. And in those ten minutes, they can hand you a slip and say, “This is cardiology,” “This is rheumatology,” “This is gastroenterology.” And all they do is give you a booking slip. And then you end up being passed between six and seven, what I call, parts doctors, and they never talk to each other. So the rheumatology guy is giving you all kinds of medicine and he doesn’t even ask what your cardiology guy is giving you, and your cardiology guy is giving you a bunch of stuff for your heart and he doesn’t ask what your gastroenterology guy is doing. And so these people end up overmedicated and trying to self-manage. Well, the one other really serious defect of this system is that they’re – number one, they’re intimidated by these doctors, so when things aren’t working very well, they wait too long to make their calls. And then when they do make the call, it’s two or three more days before they can get an appointment.

MB: So what’s the solution?

JE: So the solution was skip the government’s reimbursement system and give them a full-time doctor that they can talk to for 30 or 40 minutes. And in 30 or 40 minutes, with someone coordinating their healthcare, I can reduce their medications, I can get far better balance between their multiple chronic illnesses, and I can teach them a much better regulatory process, and I can keep them out of the hospital. So if the government’s not going to pay for it, well, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have it. So we put a healthcare system together in every campus with six or seven full-time doctors and we give everybody 30, 40-minute appointments, as often as they want them.

MB: Is this going to be limited to residents in the communities? Or might other people access it as well?

JE: Right now it’s limited to residents in the community because it costs you about $150,000 every time you hire a doctor, because the government’s giving you 11 minutes and you’re spending 30 to 40 and you’ve got to pay that difference. Now, what we did along the way, we started tracking utilization and changes, and I found out that our residents were avoiding massive amount of hospital time. So I went to Medicare and said, “Why don’t you give us a health plan and let us track the difference between using primary care the way it should be used, and how you’re using it, and show you how much you can change the reimbursement?” And of course, it took seven years to get that done, but eventually we did get our own health plan, and that’s the Erickson Advantage plan. And so now I’m doing test-piloting of about 4,000 people and I’m tracking their utilization against Medicare. And the results are astounding.

MB: So you’re doing what the HMOs should’ve done, but botched the job.

JE: I have a controlled environment. Everybody lives here. it’s all indoors. I can provide all the doctors. You’re right. That’s what HMOs could’ve done, but when people were scattered all over the neighborhood, they became the same booking agents that everybody else did. And so this is pretty similar to taking the Kaiser system in California and expanding it on a robust way to full geriatric care.

MB: Would this generalize to people in the community? Or do you have to have the people physically in the same place?

JE: In time, I think we can grow this beyond the gates to the community. And we have some plans to do that. We’d like to start letting people on the waiting list begin to be part of the health system, and then maybe even open it further to the community. So we’re just now exploring that. We had to wait until we got our Medicare certification before we took the first steps. And the other thing--the rest of the retirement community industry--your typical 300-unit higher income campus--they can’t afford to run a doctor’s office and a call system and electronic medical records and the rest. So a number of people in the industry are asking us, would we move Erickson Health into their community and provide a doctor and our medical records system, and begin giving them the same robust healthcare?

MB: Gee, you’re kind of the Henry Ford of healthcare for seniors.

JE: Well, that’s what we’re trying to pioneer. Right now, to give you an example of how successful this is, Medicare has 2,096 hospital days per 1,000 members a year, so a little over two days per person per year. We’re averaging below 1,000, 50% less than Medicare. And we haven’t age-adjusted for the 80-year and up range at our residences. Medicare is from 65 up. So if you age-adjust it, in the first couple of years, we’re probably at about 25% of the utilization that Medicare is. And in some campuses where we’ve developed out subspecialty care and the rest, we’re probably down to a tenth of the utilization in hospital time.

MB: Wow.

JE: So every one of those hospital days, I can put back into better doctor time, dental plans, balance testing, all kinds of things that Medicare misses the point on. One thing Medicare will not pay for, they won’t pay to test the balance of a person that’s 80 years old. Now, they’ll give you $50,000 for the hip fracture if you fall, but they won’t pay $50 to find out that you were likely to fall and you could’ve remediated that. So that’s what I say what we really have in our country is sick care and not healthcare.

MB: Exactly.

JE: And to do quality of aging, you have to shift that paradigm into healthcare. And we’ve been able, in the size and scope and range of what we’ve put together, we’ve been able to actually develop the first full-time healthcare for seniors.

MB: Awesome. The communities are kind of self-contained. To what extent are you trying to integrate them into other institutions in the community?

JE: The campuses are pretty self-contained but my resident group is pretty diverse in their community involvements. One campus, the wood workshop builds all the cabinets for Habitat for Humanity and installs their kitchens for them. Some of the campuses have retired teachers that will do remedial education for kids in the city. There’s food kitchen volunteers, voting precinct time, they do their volunteer work in the precinct – so our residents are big community-involved individuals because of the fact that they have the ability now to get a mass of people together with common interests and go have impact, whereas if you were sitting at home by yourself, none of them would be involved in those activities. The wood workshop would have the lights off in the garage. But because you’re doing it with ten other people and it’s fun and it’s having an impact, you spend four days a week down there.

MB: It’s a very different way of looking at it. We’re talking with John Erickson, founder of Erickson Retirement Communities and Retirement Living Television. Information on the Erickson Communities and the Erickson Tribune is at www.Erickson.com. Online you can subscribe to the Erickson Tribune. It’s free. Or they have an 800 number, 800-893-3168. That’s 800-893-3168. Or you can request information on specific Erickson Communities. Each community also has its own 800-number that you can call for information. Mr. Erickson, your company is on the Forbes List of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. What management style do you use that gets that kind of results?

JE: We put a whole lot of emphasis on the fact that our company is a mission-based company. Our mission is to have the most successful environment for aging for our residents that you could find. So our staff is very involved in how this works for our residents. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s in the dining room with young kids or it’s housekeepers in the apartment, or it’s healthcare over in Renaissance Gardens, which is where we do assisted living and nursing and dementia care. So we really do work at getting our employees to feel the commitment that we have to our residents. And we also spend a lot of energy on making sure our employees have what they need. We have a graduated benefits program so that the further down the cycle you are in pay, the more benefits we give you, as opposed to further up you pay a higher premium yourself, because that’s the group that is closest to the edge and would opt out of benefits if you didn’t give them to them. And I don’t need my service employees and line employees not having healthcare. So those are the kind of things – a few years back, we put an emergency assistance program in, so if something goes wrong and you got behind in your utility bills, instead of quitting work and moving apartments and then starting a new job, call our assistance line and we’ll pay the utility bill and we’ll help you over time manage how to pay that back.

MB: Wow.

JE: And you’ll be amazed that there’s almost no losses in that fund. And it’s used regularly. So we really work on it. We also have what we call the Erickson Way Values. We take what we believe in about the respect for the residents and for each other and for diversity, and we celebrate those values every month. We pass awards around between the employee groups to say, “You were the best example of this value of the month.” And then one other interesting thing happened.

MB: What’s that?

JE: About three years ago, the SEIU Union, the Service Employees International, decided that they were going to launch a corporate campaign against our company. So they started taking out billboards at most of our sites. They would attend all of our zoning hearings and say how awful Erickson was. And when we’d have a marketing lunch event, they would have one of these 30-foot blow-up rats out front.

MB: Oh, geez.

JE: Now, it didn’t ever affect the residents. They thought the rat was a cute little toy. They didn’t even know what the meaning of it was. And the billboards didn’t have any impact. But it made us aware of the fact that we had to be a really good employer if we really wanted to be in charge of our employees. And so three years after that corporate campaign, we were on the Fortune 100 List. And I attribute the pressure of that campaign to making us better.

MB: It made you stronger.

JE: Yes, it made us stronger. It made us pay attention at a level we probably wouldn’t have gotten to without that.

MB: I think you’d be hard-pressed to find somebody who says, “Hey, we need another television network!” What bothered you about television, at least television for seniors, that you decided to invest $100 million or so in a new television network.

JE: It just came out of an experience that I had from our existing campus. With 2,000 and 3,000 people living on the campus, everybody doesn’t know everybody. So at each campus, I put in a little neighborhood television station. And every campus broadcasts programs about hobbies and the activities and who’s doing what on campus. And it became a way of connecting the community, and I noticed that the residents really loved that kind of information. I thought, “Well, if my residents like even that much local information, why don’t we give them even more national information on aging? Why don’t we involve them?” And if you look at all of television, this is where the ageism bias comes in. The attitude is you should be happy with Murder She Wrote reruns and Matlock and sit in your chair for 25 years, and that’s all you really need is passive television.

MB: After all, we have a few older stars now. Be happy.

JE: That’s right. And so I thought, you know, we don’t need passive television. What this group would really like would be someone who talks about their 25 years in a meaningful way. And that’s everything from healthcare to travel to financial planning to events of the day, political thinking. They want that kind of information. And so I had an opportunity to test this idea in an experiment that Comcast said they would sell us a four-hour block where we could test the whole East Coast and see what the absorption levels were. And we did really well. We outdid their programming, Comcast programming on the channel, every day. Some days we even got ratings as high as the big nationals like Fox and the rest, so it started to really draw and absorb. And it didn’t just get the senior market. It got a fair piece of the middle market that’s care giving. So it was broadly accepted. So after a certain long experiment and saying, “I think it works,” now the question was, will the television industry distribute you or not? I had to pay for distribution and that’s a suicide pill. So I went back and said to Comcast, “Would you take the lead and distribute on a fair basis?” And they said yeah, they think that we proved our point. Instead of coming in with a Power Point presentation and telling everybody how good it was going to be, we spent the money, we tested it, and we outdid what they were doing. So they’ve helped us launch this network now. And I think between now and the end of the year, you’ll see retirement living broadly distributed in the digital platform all across the country.

MB: Even if you get distribution, how do you get seniors to notice and tune in among the dozens and dozens of cable stations that clutter the airways?

JE: Well, that’s one nice thing about seniors is they have time and they talk about what they are doing. Certainly you’ll do a little cross-channel promotions. We, through the years, know where the seniors are, like seniors love the Noon News, so we’ll do some advertising on the Noon News to say, “And by the way, click over to channel such-and-such and pick up Retirement Living for The Day.” If they’re interviewing Alan Greenspan on Living Live or something, we’ll get enough promotions and referrals until we actually build the viewership. And then the word of mouth crests after a while and people say, “Yeah, I saw that, I saw that.” And so that’s how you do your growth of the channel. But the biggest issue we have is that probably half of the senior market doesn’t have digital television yet. They’re still on the analog clicker for the hundred channels that you can get by just changing your television. In fact, some of them are back on the old 13 channels where you turned the dial – you remember those?

MB: Yes.

JE: Only half of the market has a digital box. And so one of the things we need to do is to work with people like the AARP and Comcast and Time-Warner to move more and more of the senior market into the digital platform, because that’s where the distribution capacity is. So that’s one of our goals.

MB: Your motto for both the Retirement Living Television, and also the Erickson Tribune, is “Involve, Inform, Inspire.” People don’t normally think of television and “involve.” How are you involving seniors with the Retirement Living TV?

JE: It’s really through our programming concept. We have this show called The Daily Café and we’re rotating people that are thinking, talking, acting, writing books. If they’re involved in issues that impact seniors in America, whether it’s Social Security, Medicare, finance, we are the source that talks about the impact of these decisions on the fixed-income senior population. So we’re dealing with topics all day long that are of interest to them. And then we intersperse, throughout these programs, these six or seven-minute vignettes on amazing things that people are doing in their retirement years. So we feature volunteerism and philanthropy and community involvement and creativity. We had an 82-year-old ice hockey player that runs a senior team and he’d had two hip replacements. We’re the opposite of that “take it easy” concept. We’re saying, “This is what’s still out there and this is what you can do and this is the impact that you can have.”

MB: So there’s a healthy dose of how-to and role models on what can be done and what you might do.

JE: And then authors that are writing and talking about places and where you can go to find out how to connect. We rotate through just about every author we can find that’s dealing with these issues. And so, instead of giving people bad advice, we’re starting to give them better and better advice.

MB: What kind of role do you see for the internet with seniors?

JE: Very, very large role. I think that, in the next ten years, the senior population will be almost 100% internet savvy.

MB: Cool.

JE: That’s where they’re going to do tons of searches and – and even all the shows that we have on osteoporosis and various diseases and the rest, all of that will be internet-available. So you’re going to see more and more of that popping up. One of the things that long-term retirement living will become the filter of getting credible information to the senior population – financial services market, healthcare market – everybody’s going to want to get good solid information to this group. And I’m going to do it in a non-infomercial, a really credible format, so that people say, “Wow, okay, I’m glad I watched that.” So it’s not going to be “Use my Lipitor over this thing.” It’s going to be, “Here’s who has the potential for coronary heart disease and here are the things that you’ve got to do and check on, and this is what you should be monitoring.” That kind of stuff.

MB: And putting the pieces together, I see that having the communities, you have people side-by-side saying, “Hey, I use the computer, it’s not that hard. Give it a try.” And then you’ve got the Tribune and the Retirement Living TV all giving information on how seniors can get familiar with the Internet and computers, and it sounds like it all fits together.

JE: It does. And what’s going to be even more important, then, is having contemporary television that starts expressing how people vote and feel and what the senior market is thinking. Get them online and talking about themselves, and we’ll start doing the surveys on how they’re thinking about issues – sort of the way that Fox News does a lot of stuff, but we’ll do it respecting the senior market, which nobody else cares about.

MB: How do you see the Erickson Foundation changing the world, and in particular, how people age?

JE: We’ve been doing a fair amount of research into successful aging issues. And we probably are the leading research group on balance for seniors, and how much remediation on balance can you do. We also have a more comprehensive program where you go through a two or three-hour exploration about your psychological, your social, your physical, your body mass index, how fast can you stand up, and how much energy do you use? And then we put a pedometer on a person’s leg for two weeks and we put it in the computer when it’s done, and we’ll tell you how much you’re walking and exercising, what’s your peak heartbeat likely to be. And then we can give you a roadmap to more successful aging, and we can tell you, “This is what’s going to be your downfall.” And it can be anything from depression, to diet, to exercise, to – you name it. And we can pinpoint these things. Most people, when they start to have that vision, will start remediation and improvement.

MB: So you’re going to show us simulations of what happens if we do this and what happens if we don’t and what happens if we do something else?

JE: That’s right. And so we already have been processing for the last, oh, five years, about 400 people through this. And we can now track the differences you can create in your 80s – how much of a difference can you make in the success of your aging program. And it’s enormous – if you want to do that. But there’s no place in society where we go give people that baseline or that information. And so those are the kind of things that our Foundation is doing. And then the other thing is that we’re not prepared in society to deal with the shift of 40 more million people into the aging cycle. We’re going to go from 35 million to 80 million, so we’re going to need a lot of help. And so that’s why we started this School of Aging Studies, the Erickson School. We want to be putting out 250, 300 kids a year that have studied aging from the sociological point of view of who in America has what resource and needs what resource to age successfully, and who’s getting it and who’s not getting it. And then where are the delivery systems coming from, what’s sustainable and what isn’t, and what are the costs? So we want to look at all the businesses of aging. And then the final piece is I want to educate these kids on the policy of aging – where is it broken and where is it going to fail, and what are the likely alternatives for making it work? And then we’ll have an army of people that can go out there to the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, area agencies on aging, the Erickson Retirement Communities, Sunrise Assisted Living, all of those places – they’re going to need people with a worldview that is informed on aging.

MB: I think that a lot of Boomers are going to be weaving in and out of the job market, working part-time, taking six months off and then taking a job, or at least doing volunteer work, maybe starting their own businesses. How do the retirement communities fit with their needs? Or are they not ready for retirement communities?

JE: They’re doing that in the first ten years of their retirement. They’re most likely going to do that from their home environment, or they made the active adult lifestyle decision to downsize and get closer to the golf courses and the tennis clubs and kind of half and half, that’s a good decision. So the first ten years, they’re going to be fine. The last ten years, you aren’t going to stop aging and you’re going to end up with more chronic illness involvement and you’re going to need more management and more sustainability. That’s going to move people closer to our product. And they’re going to be looking for large-scale environments that have more services than just the golf course. And so I think it’s going to break down pretty close in America to the way it’s taking place right now, where the first ten years will be either stay at home and work from where you are, or make a leisure decision. And then at the midpoint, the people that are looking to do really planning and worried about success – and the Boomers are going to be more in charge of this than anybody else. They’re going to be saying, “All right, I want to get myself into a much more managed environment.”

MB: Yeah, they’re not shy.

JE: No, they’re not. And in fact, I’ve seen the difference. Twenty-five years ago, it was questionable whether anybody would use the swimming pool and whether you needed a fitness center. And now you’re lengthening every swimming pool and you’re doubling the size of every fitness center. So being in charge of quality of life and fitness and wellness is where the Boomers are going to take us to a place we’ve never been before.

MB: What other dreams and visions do you have on how you’d like to change the way America handles aging and people view aging?

JE: The biggest single change we need is we need Medicare to put everybody on an electronic medical record system so that we have comprehensive data on all the “parts doctors” that are talking to them. That would give the biggest change in health where the country is, if we electronically could monitor the relationship between diseases. Immediately following having the data is you’d have better protocols. And so instead of every doctor “practicing their own art of medicine,” the art forms will be much more computerized and the computer will say, “No, you can’t give them that much dosage of this pain medicine at age 80 with what they’re taking.” The computer will say, “The maximum dosage for this person is only this amount.” Whereas right now, you walk into a doctor’s office, you’re an adult – they don’t care whether you’re a 50-year-old adult or an 80-year-old adult, and they give you a pain medicine. At 80, that just might put your into a dementia state, and at 50, it probably wouldn’t bother you. And we don’t make those distinctions. The computer would force us to. And the computer would also force us to stop overmedicating and do a much better balance. And it would also force all the doctors into looking at the base record, instead of saying, “Oh well, I don’t have to worry what the cardiologist is doing because I don’t have his record.”

MB: So the records and the Erickson Advantage both are going to have a big impact on getting people off so much medication and using exercise and just a healthier lifestyle to prevent an ameliorate, rather than popping a pill.

JE: That’s correct. That’s the way I see it. And the Boomer population is probably going to insist on it. You’ve been seeing all the announcements at Google and Microsoft. Everybody’s trying to figure out what to do with this medical record. We’re at the forefront of saying we think that we could launch a medical record system for the state of Maryland. We’ve got enough infrastructure and – we may well do that before the end of the year as part of our Foundation effort, so say at least we’re going to get one state computerized.

MB: And you didn’t even mention how difficult it is to read a lot of doctors’ writings and all the mistakes that ensue from that.

JE: That’s right, and even their own writing, you know, and – much less. Now, here’s a perfect example of the value of this. You have all this lab history for the last six or seven years in a paper chart. The doctor is never going to go back through a three-inch chart, finding this lab and the last lab and the lab before that, putting together pieces and tracking changes in hemoglobin or everything else. When you have an electronic medical record, the computer does that for you. It graphs every single time that you have a new test. It gives you the deviation and it gives you an alert saying, “Hey, this time, this changed.” That’s what doctor’s should be having to practice medicine. Instead of saying, “Well, I rooted through all my charts and I was supposed to put that together myself? There’s no possible way. And I only had 11 minutes to do that?” You couldn’t even find a page, maybe not even a chart by that time.

MB: Exactly. We’ve been talking with John Erickson, founder of Erickson Retirement Communities, Retirement Living TV, the Erickson Foundation, the Erickson Tribune, and a whole lot more. Information is at www.Erickson.com. Online, you can subscribe to the Erickson Tribune – it’s free. They have an 800-number, 800-893-3168. That’s 800-893-3168. Or you can request information on specific Erickson Communities. Each community also has its own 800-number that you can call for information. The newspaper is free and information about the communities is free. Check it out. Mr. Erickson, thank you so much for sharing with us. It’s enlightening and uplifting and exciting.

JE: Well, Dr. Brickey, I’ve enjoyed my time. It’s been enjoyable, and hopefully we can do this again.

MB: I’d love to.  

I am simply amazed at all the things that John Erickson and his organization are doing. He is truly a visionary and doing incredible things and doing them so very well, as evidenced, for example, by being one of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. I was especially impressed with his concept of retirement as having two phases, the itch phase and the maintenance phase. Secondly, his concept that living at home can be isolating and even dangerous. And third, that a community, rather than slowing down, can actually synergistically enhance creativity, enhance productivity, and allow far more opportunities for taking courses and doing things with other people. I found it interesting that these things developed through what I would call a process of continuous quality improvement. He started his first campus from an abandoned college, and then said, “What next? What else do these people need?” We saw the same continuous quality improvement process with community television networks in the communities, leapfrogging into a television network. And with him looking at medical services for seniors and saying, “This is so appalling and so dysfunctional. I’m going to create a better one, starting with hiring doctors and then developing systems, including medical records systems.”

So what can we make of all this? As Mr. Erickson pointed out, retirement has gone from two years to about 20 years, just in the last 60 years, and I think it’s going to continue to get longer and longer and longer. American life expectancy recently went up to 78 years. I still see our role model as the Energize Bunny on alkaline batteries. I kid about this but I’m also serious about it. The Energizer Bunny just keeps going and going and going. And there’s an interesting thing about alkaline batteries, that regular batteries wear out gradually and die, but alkaline batteries keep a steady state of energy and die suddenly. To me, that’s a good lifestyle. The other role model is the vital centenarians we talk about that are flying airplanes and dancing and sculpting and writing bestsellers and running for Congress and doing amazing things. Just as we had heroes as kids, we need heroes as adults, and these can be our heroes. A third role model comes from the New England Centenarian Study, in which they rounded up all the centenarians, people 100 years and older, that they could find in the New England area, and they found that a majority of them didn’t have a single disability until at least age 95, that they averaged one prescription medication, and that many of them, when they died, they died from an acute illness. That’s a great role model, too.

But the reality is that for many people, their bodies are going to wear out or their minds are going to wear out before some acute illness strikes them in their 100s. So a wise person has perspective and periodically assesses, “Am I best off living in the community at home? Or would I have a more fulfilling life in a community such as an Erickson Community?” It’s a very pragmatic question, and it’s wonderful having the rich, rich options that the Erickson Communities provide.

Since people who don’t have a family member who needs senior services often aren’t familiar with the range of services, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a couple of minutes to review what the options are. We have independent living, which typically is an apartment complex, perhaps a high-rise, perhaps a community of small cottages. And they typically provide one or two meals a day and have some modest social programming and some limited shuttle bus service. Often these communities are limited to people who don’t require intensive medical services and who can at least get around with a walker. And unfortunately, if people do become disabled enough to require assisted living or a nursing home, they have to move on. The Erickson Communities are independent living with an emphasis on a campus, a much larger size than most independent living facilities, strong emphasis on community, and a rich array of social activities to choose from. And then it makes it sweeter by even having their own doctors and medical system. Assisted living is kind of a compromise between independent living and a nursing home. Like a nursing home, they typically have apartments that open into a hallway. They provide three meals a day. They provide whatever nursing services are needed, for example, managing medications, helping with bathing, or even when necessary, spoon-feeding people. Many of them have units for dementia and Alzheimer’s. I’m seeing independent living communities such as Erickson’s increasingly provide a full range of services so that if residents develop disabilities, they can remain in the community and receive the equivalent of assisted living help or even skilled nursing care. As Mr. Erickson explained, there’s an economy of scale that it’s much more feasible for larger facilities to provide assisted living or even skilled nursing care when residents become too disabled for traditional independent living. And then finally we have the nursing homes which, frankly, are very dehumanizing facilities that are built around the needs of bureaucracies rather than human needs. It wouldn’t take much to provide a warmer atmosphere in nursing homes, to provide more dignity, to provide more privacy, and to provide better food. I think assisted living facilities are great role models for what nursing homes should be. Hopefully their example will apply pressure in the marketplace for nursing homes to become healthier, happier places.

Emails – I love getting emails! Just send them to Radio@agelesslifestyles.com.  That’s Radio@agelesslifestyles.com.  We received several emails about our interview last week with Dr. Jack Thrasher and Angel De Fazio of the National Toxic Encephalopathy Foundation. Several people emailed about how they always found perfumes and scents bother them and even make them physically ill, and were delighted to have validation that it wasn’t just them, that there were a lot of people how had these reactions. And we also received emails from parents and grandparents who said that they had no idea that carpet, carpet padding, and particle board furniture was so harmful to infants and to children. Again, I love to get those emails. Send them to Radio@agelesslifestyles.com.  This is Dr. Michael Brickey, thanking you for joining us on our quest to live longer, healthier, and happier.

Note: An  MP3 of the interview is online at http://agelesslifestyles.com/2008/06/a-visionary-redefines-aging-and-retirement/