Restoration and Augmentation to Integrating Geriatrics into the Subspecialties of Internal Medicine

Grant Summary

An award in 1994 to the American Geriatrics Society, Inc. (AGS) provided resources for an ongoing effort to embed geriatrics into the subspecialties of internal medicine. Its key approach has been a series of "Geriatric Education Retreats," intensive five-day immersions of subspecialists into the geriatric aspects of their disciplines. These retreats have succeeded in raising awareness of each discipline's leaders and led to extensive and varied follow-up via geriatric supplements to subspecialty journals. This restoration maintains the momentum and capitalizes on new opportunities. One relates to working with subspecialty societies to increase their motivation to create the geriatric educational materials relevant to the recertification needs of their members, and the second takes advantage of the explosive growth in electronic technologies being applied to patient care and physician education using the nation's most successful and widely used electronic educational mechanism available at the bedside. An augmentation will be used to cover a portion of the costs of the planning phase of a new Task Force on the Future of Geriatrics which has been created by AGS.