JAHF Board of Trustees Approve Three Grants Totaling More Than $3.28 million
The John A. Hartford Foundation Board of Trustees has approved three grants totaling more than $3.28 million to renew and expand work to ensure that the voices of older adults and aging-expert professionals are heard in the continuing debates over health care delivery; to develop quality measures and performance standards that support integrated, patient-centered, goal-based care that helps people to achieve their priority outcomes; and to continue the ReFraming Aging Initiative, which seeks to counter the pervasive negative beliefs about aging that are barriers to improving the care of older adults.
The John A. Hartford Foundation Board of Trustees has approved three grants totaling more than $3.28 million to renew and expand work to ensure that the voices of older adults and aging-expert professionals are heard in the continuing debates over health care delivery; to develop quality measures and performance standards that support integrated, patient-centered, goal-based care that helps people to achieve their priority outcomes; and to continue the ReFraming Aging Initiative, which seeks to counter the pervasive negative beliefs about aging that are barriers to improving the care of older adults.
The Board approved a three-year, $1,525,757 renewal grant to Community Catalyst, a national health care consumer advocacy organization based in Boston, to expand the partnership between aging-expert health care professionals and consumer advocates in the Voices for Better Health initiative, which is working to ensure that integrated health plans for dually eligible Medicare/Medicaid individuals deliver high-quality care to this vulnerable population. Over the past two years, the project has successfully drawn on health professional expertise for more effective advocacy with health plans, state regulators, and federal agencies on issues such as quality of care and workforce training. Building on Community Catalyst’s new Center for Consumer and Community Engagement, this grant will also be used to engage aging-expert health care professionals in advocacy focused on other financing and care delivery changes happening at the federal and state level. In addition, Community Catalyst will participate in and share its policy and advocacy expertise with the John A. Hartford Foundation Change AGEnts community.
In partnership with The SCAN Foundation, the Board approved a two-year, $1,240,504 renewal grant to the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) , a national non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that develops quality standards and performance measures for health care entities. The grant will support two related projects to improve the care of complex and vulnerable older adults. The first project will meet the immediate need of developing and pilot testing accreditation standards for the coordination of long-term supports and services in health plans and community-based organizations. The standards, designed to be implemented in NCQA accreditation programs, will address the structures and processes needed to coordinate person-centered, goal-based care. The second project represents a second phase in a longer term, three-phase effort to develop performance measures for health plans focused on outcomes identified by older adults as important. These measures will be designed for eventual use in NCQA accreditation programs, and by states and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Together, these projects will meet the need for quality measures that assess how well organizations provide integrated, patient-centered, goal-based care that helps people to achieve their priority outcomes.
The Board also approved a three-year, $515,650 grant to continue support of the ReFraming Aging initiative, which will counter the pervasive negative beliefs about aging that are barriers to improving the care of older adults in the United States. The initiative represents a collaboration of eight major aging services and professional organizations: AARP, the American Federation for Aging Research, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Society on Aging, the Gerontological Society of America, the National Council on Aging, the National Hispanic Council on Aging, and Grantmakers in Aging, which serves as the fiscal home for the project. With support from six foundations, the collaborating organizations are working with a communications research firm, the FrameWorks Institute, to develop counter-messages, alternative metaphors, and ways of “re-framing” public understanding of aging to motivate public action. The first phase of the initiative to study how the public, media, and experts currently think and talk about aging issues has been completed. Following final message development and testing, the project will train a wide constituency of stakeholders in the new framework and convene a campaign to put the new messaging into circulation.