We already know what older people want. A study from the National Conference of State Legislatures and AARP, as well as other studies, confirm, time and again, that the vast majority of us want to live in our homes and communities as we age, and, if possible, to avoid dependence on others and institutionalization.
Meeting this deeply personal goal requires that we design and provide good care in our hospitals and clinics, and expand that care beyond traditional boundaries. It requires the involvement of both health care and community-based service providers; a skilled paid workforce; and a well-supported, family-based “care force.” It also, of course, requires the correct blend of policies and funding.
This is an increasingly urgent concern. A person turns sixty-five every eight seconds, and according to Census numbers, the population of people age eighty-five and older, which doubled in the past thirty years, is projected to almost triple to more than 14 million people by 2040.
One obstacle we face is that our country spends almost twice as much on health care as on social services. To enable more older people to get the care and the outcomes they seek, we must find ways to balance our investment between these types of services, work together across sectors, and use our resources in forward-looking ways.
A good framework for this approach can be found in the work of the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Aging, Disability, and Independence, which I cochair with Fernando Torres-Gil of the University of California, Los Angeles. A collaboration of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the forum provides a critically needed and neutral venue to bring together aging and disability stakeholders from around the country, accelerate the transfer of research to practice and policy, and identify levers of change.
Supporting this type of transition and building the coalitions to carry it out are, in many ways, the essential role of philanthropy. At the John A. Hartford Foundation, we are committed to promoting better care for older people. To help more of us remain independent, we are supporting research and evidence-based programs in two broad areas: integrating community-based services with traditional health care and providing more coordinated care focused on older people’s own goals.
Supporting family and community resources
Our health care system has been developed to perform life-saving and critically needed interventions and procedures, such as stents, transplants, radiation, and chemotherapy. But such high-tech care, while important, is often not well matched with the wants and needs of older adults, particularly those who require help with their personal care and daily activities.
A much more common need for older people and their families is coping with multiple chronic conditions and the complications they can bring. Clinics and hospitals need to be better designed to support this chronic care, but the vast majority of care actually takes place in our homes and communities. To remain at home and successfully manage one’s chronic conditions, many more older adults need excellent long-term services and supports—such as transportation, mobility aids, housing modifications, and accessible home care. Without these, they struggle.
Their caregivers need help, as well, and the Institute of Medicine’s Study on Family Caregiving for Older Adults, which will be released in spring 2016 with funding from the John A. Hartford Foundation and fourteen other sponsors, should create a blueprint for how we can best support the family and friends who provide unpaid care worth an estimated $470 billion annually. (See list of study sponsors below.)
The Affordable Care Act and the new emphasis on value-based payment to accountable care organizations (ACOs) are changing incentives and placing a new focus on the importance of social services and supports for patients and caregivers alike. But how do we best structure and provide these services?
At the John A. Hartford Foundation, we are supporting work in California by the Partners in Care Foundation, and in Massachusetts by Elder Services of Merrimack Valley and Hebrew SeniorLife, to create more integrated care systems that link community-based, social service agencies to the health care sector.
We are also working with the federal Administration for Community Living, the SCAN Foundation, and the Tufts Health Plan Foundation to help representatives of the aging services network in eleven communities build their business acumen so they can work more effectively with health care providers, fill in service gaps, and meet the needs of older adults.
Reshaping care delivery, promoting teams
Good care must be team care, and good teams don’t just happen. Our foundation has a long-standing commitment to improving team care—for example, it has supported a Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training program at several universities and team-based practice models in clinic, hospital, and long-term care settings.
Meeting the whole range of health and social needs of frail older adults in each of these settings requires care coordination, reliable communication among team members (who may be in other practices or specialties or outside of the formal health system), and technology that promises to facilitate and monitor care.
The Mobile Acute Care Team (MACT) model is a good example. MACT is a hospital-at-home approach for older adults, where a team of nurses, physicians, social workers, and allied health care professionals provide acute-level care through home visits and monitoring. Studies have found that this approach lowers costs by nearly one-third and reduces infections and other complications. It is highly rated by patients and caregivers alike. Initially developed at Johns Hopkins University with support from the John A. Hartford Foundation, MACT is now being tested at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City with a substantial amount of funding from the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
Making these kinds of services widely available will require significant changes in how care is delivered, and that is not easy. But with older adults becoming an ever-larger part of our population and our health care system continuing to experience rapid change because of market and policy forces, we must focus on delivering care that people actually want. By working together, we can provide services and supports that meet people where they are and honor their goals. That’s our definition of better care.
Author’s postscript:
The following entities have sponsored the caregiving study mentioned above:
- Alliance for Aging Research
- Alzheimer’s Association
- Anonymous Donor
- Archstone Foundation
- California HealthCare Foundation
- Commonwealth Fund
- Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation
- Health Foundation for Western and Central New York
- May and Stanley Smith Charitable Trust
- Retirement Research Foundation
- The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation
- Santa Barbara Foundation
- Tufts Health Plan Foundation
- Veterans Health Administration
from Health Affairs Blog http://ift.tt/1Por6gc
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