It’s going to take all of us working together to make the changes we need to ensure that older Americans get the quality health care they deserve.
So I’m pleased to share the news that five winning teams have been selected to receive Collaborative Pilot Grants through a joint program between the John A. Hartford Foundation Centers of Excellence in Geriatric Medicine and Psychiatry and the Hartford Change AGEnts.
The five winning teams were chosen from 25 applications received from 15 centers, and were announced by the Hartford Foundation and the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR).
The winning projects received the highest ratings for the criteria we were seeking: innovative projects that are inter-center and/or interdisciplinary, are based on the foundation’s new strategic focus on effecting change in health care practice, and which have a high likelihood of developing into a larger, ongoing initiative that has the potential to be sustained beyond the one or two years of the grant.
So (drumroll please) here are the five teams that will receive $40,000 each for their projects:
- Susan M. Friedman, MD, MPH, University of Rochester, and Krupa Shah, MD, MPH University of Rochester: THRIVE: The Healthy Rochester Initiative for Vitality among Elders, A Pilot Project to Promote Healthy Aging
- Alexander Lo, MD, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Kevin Biese, MD, University of North Carolina: Emergency Care of Older Adults: Analysis of Different Care Models to Improve Access
- Timothy F. Platts-Mills, MD, MSc, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and Sheryl Zimmerman, MSW, PhD, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill: A Brief Patient-Oriented Educational Video to Improve Outcomes for Older Adults with Acute Musculoskeletal Pain
- Elizabeth Camille Vaughan, MD, MS, Emory University, and Ula Hwang, MD, MPH, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: The EQUiPPED Collaborative: Enhancing QUality in Prescribing Practices for Older Adults Discharged from the Emergency Department
- Mamata Yanamadala, MBBS, MSc, Duke University and Juliessa Pavon, MD, Duke University: Electronic Medical Record Assisted Dissemination of a Collaborative Care Model for Preoperative Optimization of Senior Health (POSH)
I join the Hartford Foundation and AFAR in offering heartfelt congratulations to the winning teams! Look to ChangeAGEnts365.org to learn about these projects, their progress, and lessons learned.
AFAR’s Beeson Scholars program is currently offering a similar funding opportunity, and more opportunities will be announced through the Change AGEnts program.
Together, these CoE Scholars—along with the Change AGEnts, Practice Change Leaders, and other champions for better geriatric care—will lead the way to improving the health of older adults.