Improving Hospital Care Transitions for Older Adults

Grant Summary

The John A. Hartford Foundation awarded a grant to the Society of Hospital Medicine to develop and disseminate nationally a quality improvement program to make the hospital discharge process safer for older patients, improving the process at over 100 hospitals and affecting over 270,000 discharges each year. This grant continues the work of a previous $400,000 award to the Society of Hospital Medicine to develop leadership training for hospitalists and test discharge planning models. Funding will be used to develop a set of interventions to optimize the hospital discharge transition for older adults, building on earlier Foundation-funded discharge planning demonstration projects and other studies and models from the "patient-centered care" movement. Funding will also be used to create an instruction manual for implementing, evaluating, and sustaining the interventions; leadership training, mentored implementation of interventions, and intensive on-site consultation to improve the capacity of community and academic hospitals to implement and sustain the quality improvement models; and dissemination of the interventions, instruction manual, and project outcomes through professional journal publication and other forums.