Expanding and Sustaining the CAPABLE Aging in Place Program
A proven aging-in-place program struggled to move from successful local pilots to sustained, national scale.
Summary
CAPABLE (Community Aging in Place, Advancing Better Living for Elders) is an evidence-based program shown to save Medicare over $15,000 per participant, yet like many effective local pilots it has struggled to scale nationally. Tomoko Ichikawa’s Spring 2025 Communication Design Workshop partnered with André Nogueira at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing to apply visual systems thinking to the challenge, mapping CAPABLE’s national ecosystem and funding pathways and studying four implementation sites in Kentucky, Chicago, Boston, and Colorado. The resulting design principles, opportunity model, and four forward-looking growth concepts give CAPABLE’s national team concrete starting points for sustaining and expanding the program.
Why it’s important
Per the page: 10,000 people will turn 65 each day for the next 15 years, and 74% of those over 85 experience functional limitations; 80 million people will be 65+ in the US by 2040. Despite CAPABLE’s proven effectiveness — cost savings of over $15,000 per participant for Medicare, and over $22,000 in total savings for every $3,000 invested — moving from successful local pilots to sustained, large-scale implementation has been difficult.
Real-world impact
As of the page’s publication, CAPABLE operates at 65+ sites across 23 states, serving 3,600 participants. The team delivered CAPABLE with a practical guide containing frameworks to address scaling barriers, plus four envisioning concepts — CAPABLE Compass, CAPABLE InsightHub, Data Story Engine, and CAPABLE Commons — offered as “catalysts,” not blueprints, along with a framework for CAPABLE to develop further concepts on its own.
To learn more: https://id.iit.edu/projects/expanding-and-sustaining-the-capable-aging-in-place-program/
Adapted from: “Expanding and Sustaining the CAPABLE Aging in Place Program.” Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, November 14, 2025. https://id.iit.edu/projects/expanding-and-sustaining-the-capable-aging-in-place-program/. Course project led by Tomoko Ichikawa (Institute of Design) with André Nogueira (Johns Hopkins School of Nursing).
