A Hospitals & Health Networks piece looks at the future of geriatric friendly care as the John A. Hartford Foundation, Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the American Hospital Association, along with other partners, launch a joint Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative.

”The initiative is meant to develop and test evidence-based, health systemwide prototype models of care for older adults. Its goal is to spread the Age-Friendly Health Systems model to 20 percent of hospitals and health systems in the U.S. by 2020,” H&HN reported.

”The partners drew from the knowledge of top geriatric experts and evidence-based elements from 20 age-friendly models sponsored by Hartford to form the heart of the new age-friendly model.”

Kedar Mate, M.D., chief education and innovation officer at the IHI, and principal investigator of the initiative, says there are four “Ms” in the program: ”medication (getting medicines right, reviewing the medication, de-escalating therapy and looking at medications as a whole as a big risk area), mobility (getting people up, keeping them moving to make sure they can perform activities for independence and prevent functional decline), mentation (improving care for patients with depression, dementia and delirium) and ‘what matters.’ The last is considered top priority, Dr. Mate says, because “unless we know what matters to older people, we cannot do what matters for older people.”

H&HN reported: ”The first year of the grant will be dedicated to working within small-scale clinical settings to streamline and simplify age-friendly models and eventually scale up to the size of the four systems involved initially: Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, Calif.; Trinity Health System, Steubenville, Ohio; Providence St. Joseph Health, in seven Pacific, Mountain and Great Plains states; and Anne Arundel Medical Center, Annapolis, Md.”

To read more, please this link.