Five New Grants Totaling $4.8 Million Approved by JAHF Board of Trustees at June 2016 Meeting
The John A. Hartford Foundation Board of Trustees has approved five new grants totaling $4.8 million that seek to close gaps in the delivery of quality care to older adults. At their June 2016 quarterly meeting, Trustees approved a new initiative that brings together national leaders in the move to improve home-based primary care to address the gap in care for the frailest, sickest homebound elders. Three other grants focus on important gaps in health care policy related to palliative care, hospital admission status, and oral health through outreach, education, and advocacy. And the Foundation is partnering with Kaiser Health News (KHN) to address the gap in high-quality news coverage and public understanding about the complex issues of health care delivery and its impact on older adults and their families.
Moving and Scaling Home-Based Primary Care into the Mainstream of U.S. Health Care:
($1,544,347 for three years)
- Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine ($939,568 for three years)
- Home Centered Care Institute ($454,779 for three years)
- American Academy of Home Care Medicine ($150,000 for two years)
This initiative aims to improve the health of the most frail and vulnerable elders living in the community by increasing access to and the quality of home-based primary care. The work involves three components: a data registry will be developed to measure the quality of these services and move toward value-based payment for home-based primary care; training curricula and educational programming will be created to build the workforce; and information about payment models for these services will be developed and disseminated. Together, these three coordinated components will foster more and better trained home-based primary care providers delivering measurably improved care.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation - Kaiser Health News: The Geriatric Care Reporting Project
($2,472,650 for three years)
This three-year partnership with Kaiser Health News (KHN), the nation’s leading health policy news service, will establish a top-tier reporting desk that will build awareness and understanding of geriatric care issues among the public, policymakers, and the health care sector. KHN will focus on both problems and solutions in how health care systems work, the policies that drive their behavior and the care experiences of older people and their families. Over 120 articles, 2 large-scale investigative projects, and 2 events will be produced each year, in addition to consumer-oriented informational pieces and resources. KHN has distribution partnerships with The Washington Post, NPR, and other media outlets that reach tens of millions of people. The project will benefit from the overall reporting resources of KHN and the polling and research capacities of its parent organization, the Kaiser Family Foundation.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: Roundtable on Quality Care for People with Advanced Illness
($211,415 for three years)
In order to improve the care of older adults living with serious illness and at end of life, this project will promote and accelerate implementation of recommendations from the 2014 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life. The Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine) will convene the Roundtable on Quality of Care for People with Advanced Illness with providers, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders who will meet nine times over a three-year period to advance actions and policy work in areas such as access to palliative and advance care planning.
Center for Medicare Advocacy: Reducing Harm to Medicare Beneficiaries - Improving Hospital Observation Status and Other Policies
($500,000 for two years)
This project will raise visibility and diminish the negative impact of the “observation status” classification of older hospitalized adults through outreach and education by the Center for Medicare Advocacy (CMA). Observation status is a categorization of Medicare patients who are deemed to be outpatients rather than admitted inpatients in hospitals, even if their stay extends to multiple days. This status has profound consequences on patients’ quality and cost of care. Medicare coverage of often-needed post-acute care in a skilled nursing facility, for example, requires three inpatient hospital days. Over two years, CMA will gather existing resources and collect stories from beneficiaries, produce and update advocacy materials, and conduct extensive outreach and education that will result in 45,000 messages to policymakers to improve observation status policy through regulatory change, better federal guidance, and increased awareness by legislators. The grant funding for this project will also strengthen CMA’s advocacy on other important issues, including increasing access to oral health care for older adults.
Santa Fe Group: Oral Health for America’s Seniors - Expanding Medicare
($100,170 for 18 months)
Older adults often have chronic diseases that may exacerbate oral health conditions, and vice versa. Medicare, however, does not cover dental care except in very rare circumstances and more than 70 percent of the Medicare-aged population has no dental insurance, leading to impairments in both their oral and overall health. This grant will activate an interprofessional mix of individuals, institutions, agencies, and organizations who will work collaboratively to identify and execute a multi-pronged strategy to expand dental coverage for older adults. Led by the Santa Fe Group, the collaboration will catalyze broad opportunities to define the need and the appropriate set of benefits, focusing on expanding dental coverage under Medicare Part B and within Medicare Advantage programs.
For more information, read JAHF President Terry Fulmer’s Health AGEnda post.