Time and again I find myself amazed and delighted at the sheer magnitude of recognition Hartford grantees continue to garner from both the public and their peers for demonstrating leadership in the field of aging. Most recently, Partners in Care Foundation, under the direction of CEO W. June Simmons, received…
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We are not the only ones in the aging arena making use of new media. Many of our grantees are using podcasting technology to get their message out. Want to listen in? Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of free audio and video podcasts and webcasts those of us working in…
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In the grantmaking world there is a cynical fear that as soon as the money is gone, the work will be forgotten, everyone will move on to the next grant, and there will be no lasting value. Because, with a few exceptions, the joint American Society on Aging/National Council on…
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In my Tuesday post, I basked in the glory of Hartford grantees who were influential in shaping reform of the health care delivery system. It is only by making real changes in what health care professionals ultimately *DO* to treat disease and promote health that we can simultaneously improve older…
Read full postLast week, in the run-up to the passage of the health reform legislation, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, took a brief time-out from Washington politics to speak at the joint meeting of the American Society on Aging/National Council on Aging in Chicago. In part her remarks were…
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In January, shortly after the earthquake in Haiti, a distressing article hit the newswire. I was horrified to read that 84 surviving residents of the Port-au-Prince municipal nursing home lacked food, water, medicine, and basic care despite the fact that they were only a mile from the airport where aid…
Read full postWe are always interested in reminding the public that geriatricians are in alarmingly short supply just as the need for them is growing. That’s why I was so happy to find this excellent article in the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel featuring geriatrician Ed Duthie, chief of the Division of Geriatrics and…
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As I wrote a few days ago, the Medicare fee setting process of the RUC "bakes in" too much of what is common practice in medicine and makes it too hard to change. This is a major issue in primary care, where current low payments for evaluation and management services…
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Last week I was sitting in on a briefing for policymakers on the workings of the RUC, the controversial Relative Value Update Committee. The RUC is sponsored by the American Medical Association (AMA) to provide input into the Medicare physician fee schedule, the list of payment fees for the thousands…
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Every culture and organization has stories that cement the common understanding of its members as to what is important and what is dangerous. At the Foundation, many of these stories are about the difficulty of getting honest feedback from grantees and people who might like to be grantees. One of…
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