2016_NewYear_shutterstock_339017210_400pAs we prepare to greet 2016 tonight, we want to take this opportunity to wish you all a healthy and happy new year!

We hope you share our excitement about the coming year, and the bright prospects it brings to deliver better care for older adults. But before we sing Auld Lang Syne, we’d like to take a minute to reflect on and celebrate some of our Health AGEnda highlights from 2015.

New Leadership

This year brought new leadership and new energy to The John A. Hartford Foundation, with the hiring of Terry Fulmer, PhD, RN, FAAN, as President. During her first weeks in her new role, Dr. Fulmer introduced herself to Health AGEnda readers and shared her excitement about working with new Board of Trustees Chair Peggy Wolff.

Over the course of the year, Dr. Fulmer took us behind the scenes as she joined other leaders in the field in participating in the once-a-decade White House Conference on Aging and met with officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to discuss opportunities for collaboration to improve care of older adults . And earlier this month, Dr. Fulmer shared her insights about five new grants totaling $6.7 million that build momentum heading into the new year.

Three Issues You’ll Hear More About in the Coming Year

In 2015, Foundation staff laid the groundwork on several issues that are critical to older adults, including: end-of-life and advance care planning; family caregiving; and elder justice. You can expect to hear more about these issues in 2016.

Senior Program Officer Amy Berman wrote an open letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that was printed in the Washington Post, as well as on Health AGEnda, advocating passionately for a rule change that would cover advance care planning discussions between health care providers and patients. The rule change was approved in November, and takes effect—Happy New Year!—on Jan. 1, 2016. Amy followed up with a post explaining why the rule is a game-changer—and what steps still need to be taken to make sure the benefits are fully realized. Earlier in the year, Dr. Fulmer shared learnings from a meeting convened by the Foundation at its offices in New York City focused on “End of Life and Serious Illness,” gathering leading innovators in the field and funders with deep interest in this area.

In the spring of 2016, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) is expected to release its landmark report on family caregiving. In anticipation of its publication, The John A. Hartford Foundation, in partnership with the Gerontological Society of America (GSA), has provided funding to implement the recommendations of the report. Gary P. Epstein-Lubow, MD, a member of the Foundation’s Change AGEnts Initiative’s Dementia Caregiving Network, wrote about his participation in the IOM process and the role that grantees are playing in this important work.

The Foundation also brought to light the joys and challenges of family caregiving through a story contest that drew more than 100 entries. Read the winning entries to gain a better understanding of the issues before the IOM report is released.

And over the summer, Senior Program Officer Nora OBrien-Suric shared a trifecta of good news for those advocating on behalf of elder justice coming from all three branches of the federal government.

Two Initiatives in the Spotlight

Throughout 2015, we ran a series of posts on two of our ambitious initiatives: The John A. Hartford Foundation Change AGEnts and the Social Innovation Fund. You can certainly expect to hear more about both in the coming year.

Earlier this month, we held our second annual Change AGEnts conference in Philadelphia, and Senior Program Officer Marcus Escobedo shared thought-provoking insights from the keynote presentation by David Altman, Executive Vice President and Managing Director at the Center for Creative Leadership. For a complete picture of the Foundation’s Change AGEnts Initiative, read the series of posts we ran on our 2014 Annual Report. This post on Community Catalyst’s advocacy work contains links at the end to all of the other posts in the series.

Similarly, we ran a series of posts on the Foundation’s Social Innovation Fund program, which is spreading evidence-based depression treatment to the rural Northwest. A post by Diane Powers, Associate Director for Translation and Implementation at the AIMS Center at the University of Washington, recounts the history of the project and kicks off the series. And this post by Earl Sutherland, Medical Director at Bighorn Valley Health Center in Hardin, Montana, contains links to the other posts we published by leaders at the rural health clinics participating in the program.

These are just a few of the many posts published on Health AGEnda this year. To all who contributed their talents, and all who took the time to read and comment, we express our sincere thanks. We look forward to sharing more good news about improving care of older adults on Health AGEnda in 2016.