A Collaborative Effort to Improve Geriatric Care

University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center is one of only six healthcare sites in the United States invited by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (New York) and Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore) to participate in a program to develop and apply best practices in geriatric medicine. The Medicare Innovations Collaborative, formed in 2007 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies, has the goal of developing a strategy and implementation plan for a national technical assistance program to improve access to, and effectiveness of, geriatric care in the United States.

Through the Medicare Innovations Collaborative, UH Cleveland Medical Center will provide expertise to other healthcare providers that want to develop programs in senior care based on known models of care. These programs include Acute Care for the Elderly (ACE), a program originally developed at UH; Nurses Improving Care for HealthSystem Elders (NICHE), and Palliative Care for hospitalized patients with difficulty to control symptoms.

In turn, UH Cleveland Medical Center hopes to tap into other providers’ expertise in transitional care and to add a program known as Hospital to Home that is designed to provide hospital-level care in a patient’s home as a full substitute for acute hospital care