IHI Blog: Can Age-Friendly Care Help Address Health Equity?
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has published a blog, "Can Age-Friendly Care Help Address Health Equity?"
"Emerging data from the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S. indicates that the pandemic is having an outsized impact on communities of color, especially African Americans. While addressing systemic inequities that contribute to these outcomes will require a range of remedies, one approach to improving health care for older adults may prove helpful," notes the blog.
Medical director Lenise Cummings-Vaughn, MD, talks about the disparities she has noticed, for instance, among older adults' access to telehealth technology, and among facilities. Dr. Cummings-Vaughn says that the Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative's '4Ms', (What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility), "can not only help improve care for older adults generally; they can help mitigate bias on the part of care providers toward different subsets of older adults. The 4Ms can reduce subjectivity in answering the question of whether something needs to be done — such as explicitly asking What Matters — and make it automatic. 'I think a lot of times we don’t know what matters to people,' says Cummings-Vaughn. 'We might believe we know what matters and treat them a certain way.' She says the 4Ms may be 'a great leveler.'”
The blog argues for the importance of a nuanced approach to differences and similarities among patients.
To read the blog, click here.
To learn more about the Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative, click here.
