The nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement is engaging 30 U.S. health systems to accelerate and spread adoption of evidence-based, high-quality care for older adults across all of their sites and care settings.
The Age-Friendly System-Wide Spread Collaborative is the latest endeavor of the Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative, which has recognized 3,907 care settings as age-friendly since 2018. Age-Friendly Health Systems is an initiative of The John A. Hartford Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), in partnership with the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA).
A few years ago, Mary Tinetti, M.D., chief of geriatrics at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital, gave a definition of age-friendly health systems. “Being an age-friendly health system means that everyone involved in the healthcare of older adults, from the person who cleans the room or greets you at the desk, the nurses, the doctors, therapists, everybody understands what is important to you as an individual, and that as we you get older, we accumulate more conditions, that we value different things, and that what matters most to me may be different than what matters to you,” Tinetti said.
Age-friendly health systems deliver four evidence-based elements of high-quality care, known as the 4Ms: What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility. During the 18-month Collaborative, health systems will test changes to ensure that the 4Ms are provided reliably and equitably as a standard practice across their entire system. The 30 participating teams will share data, learn from each other, and work to advance their own improvement aims to equitably scale age-friendly care delivery and adopt the 4Ms system-wide.
“This is an exciting and ambitious endeavor and responds to the overwhelming interest of systems to deliver age-friendly care to older adults and their family caregivers. It is a testament to the increasing importance of the Age-Friendly Health Systems movement to support our health systems and workforce to provide excellent care to the growing older adult population,” said Leslie Pelton, M.P.A., vice president of IHI, in a statement. “This Collaborative will give health systems the tools they need to provide the highest standard of care to every older adult at every care interaction and will exponentially increase the number of people who will benefit from the 4Ms.”
The 30 health systems participating in the Collaborative include hospitals, ambulatory care practices, convenient care clinics, and nursing homes. They each have at least two sites of care recognized by IHI as Committed to Care Excellence, and they will have the opportunity to be among the first to achieve a new IHI recognition for system-wide spread of the 4Ms.
