Melissa Withers is the Director of Communications and Market Development for the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.

The Business Innovation Factory announced last week that it is partnering with the Tockwotton Home, Quality Partners of Rhode Island and the MIT AgeLab to create a real-world laboratory for developing and testing new solutions, products and models for improving elderly care.

Leveraging the BIF Experience Lab platform, the “Nursing Home of the Future” will create a platform for innovators and industry partners to transform current approaches to elderly care in assisted living and nursing care facilities. Outcomes will provide a roadmap for redesigning the next generation of elderly care solutions and help companies and care providers deliver better value to the burgeoning elderly population.

For this effort, the partnership team engages residents and staff at Tockwotton Home, a 30-bed assisted living center and 42-bed skilled nursing home located in Providence. The Tockwotton Home provides the partnership access to a working home where residents and partners can co-develop a real-world understanding of the elderly experience and a platform for developing and testing new solutions. Tockwotton Home also plans to open a new 150-bed facility in 2010 in which they will dedicate a patient unit and common living areas to the Nursing Home of the Future initiative.

Partners are now recruiting Phase 1 sponsors and mobilizing the initiative. Phase 1 activities will begin with a comprehensive analysis and mapping of the current experience of nursing home and assisted-living residents, an analysis of unmet needs in current care models, the identification and prioritization of an initial set of target opportunities, the architectural design of the patient unit in the new home, and ongoing stakeholder engagement and communication efforts.

Although it will be a few months before the team is in active experimentation mode I already predict that the biggest opportunities for improving the elder care experience will not be found in simply dropping new tools and gadgets into the environment. The big wins, I think, we’ll come from integrative solutions that recognize how information and activities need to be connected across the entire elder care experience. The BIF team is excited to have this project off the ground and looks forward to working with interest parties within our state’s info-tech and digital media community as the project progresses.

Check out a full description of the initiative here.