As most of you know, there were several giant changes to health care for older Americans in 2010, such as the rollout of the $500,000,000 community care transitions program and the "stand-up" of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI). There are also many smaller ones. A new…
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Looking forward to a great year for Americans of all ages in 2011. Best wishes from HealthAGEnda and the John A. Hartford Foundation.
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As 2010 draws to a close, I find myself looking back through the 100 or so posts we made to HealthAGEnda this year. I thought about doing a “Best of” post like we did last year, but there are too many good ones. I couldn’t pick. Instead, I’d like to…
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This bit of complex math celebrates the tremendous impact that three (3) Foundation grantees have had in shaping Section 3026 of the Affordable Care Act, the Community Care Transitions Program. This section, along with the incentive provisions of section 3025 (penalties and prizes for high and low rates of hospital…
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While reading the article "Desire in the Twilight of Life" in the Wall Street Journal, by Mark Lachs, MD, director of geriatrics for the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System and professor of clinical medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College, I was reminded of a lively dinner conversation with a group…
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At this point we know a lot about problems in the care of older people that reveal themselves in elevated costs of care. We know that the relatively few Medicare beneficiaries who have multiple chronic conditions account for a huge amount of Medicare spending. We know that older adults…
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Last year around this time, I was profoundly shaken and continue to be deeply concerned by a paper from Academic Medicine by Lorna Lynn and her collaborators showing the low quality of chronic and geriatric care delivered in internal and family medicine residencies. This year I was equally shaken…
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On November 30 and December 1 about 500 nurses and health care leaders convened in Washington, DC, to launch the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ)-funded Institute of Medicine (IOM) "Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health" report. This 562-page report offers eight recommendations—many ambitious (Recommendation #4: Increase the proportion of nurses…
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Cheryl Sullivan, CEO of AAN (left), and Terry Fulmer (right) A few weeks ago, I devoted a blog to our grantees who received awards at the recent GSA meeting in New Orleans. Before the meeting began, one of our grant programs, Building Academic Geriatric Nursing Capacity (BAGNC), held its…
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November is National Family Caregivers Month. And in fact, mid-November also marked the beginning of a year-long celebration of the 10th anniversary of the National Family Caregiver Support Program. So there is no better time to announce the release of the National Association of Social Workers’ recent publication detailing the…
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