Shifting Culture Toward Age-Friendly Care: Lessons From VHA Early Adopters
Background: The need for a health care workforce with expanded skills in the care of older adults is increasingly evident as the US population ages. The evidence-based Age-Friendly Health Systems (AFHS) framework establishes a structure to reliably assess and deliver effective care of older adults with multiple chronic conditions: what matters, medication, mentation, and mobility (4Ms). Half of veterans receiving Veterans Health Administration (VHA) care are aged ≥ 65 years, driving its transformation into the largest AFHS in the US. In this article, we offer lessons on the challenges to AFHS delivery and suggest opportunities to sustaining age-friendly care.
Observations: Within 3 months of implementation, 85% to 100% of patients received 4M care in all care settings at our VA facilities. Key lessons learned include the importance of identifying, preparing, and supporting a champion to lead this effort; garnering facility and system leadership support at the outset; and integration with the electronic health record (EHR) for reliable and efficient data capture, reporting, and feedback. Although the goal is to establish AFHS in all care settings, we believe that initially including a geriatrics-focused care setting helped early adoption of 4Ms care in the sites described here.
Conclusions: Early adopters at 2 VHA health care systems demonstrated successful AFHS implementation spanning different VHA facilities and care settings. Successful growth and sustainability may require leveraging the EHR to reduce documentation burden, increase standardization in care, and automate feedback, tracking, and reporting. A coordinated effort is underway to integrate AFHS into VHA documentation, performance evaluation, and metrics in both the legacy and new Cerner EHRs.
Lessons Learned
Key lessons learned include the importance of identifying, preparing, and supporting a champion to lead this effort; garnering facility and system leadership support at the outset; and integration with the EHR for reliable and efficient data capture, reporting, and feedback. Preparing and supporting champions was achieved through national and individual calls and peer support. Guidance was provided on garnering leadership support, including local needs assessment and data analysis, meeting with leadership to first understand their key challenges and priorities and provide information on the AFHS movement, requesting a follow-up meeting to discuss local needs and data, and exploring how an AFHS might help address one or more of their priorities.
In September 2022, an AFHS 4Ms note template was introduced into the EHR for all VA sites for data capture and reporting, to standardize and facilitate documentation across all age-friendly VA sites, and decrease the reporting burden for staff. This effort is critically important: The ability to document, track, and analyze 4Ms measures, provide feedback, and synergize efforts across systems is vital to design studies to determine whether the AFHS 4Ms approach to care achieves substantive improvements in patient care across settings.
Limitations
Limitations of this analysis include the small sample of care settings, which did not include a skilled nursing or long-term care facility, nor general primary care. Although the short timeframe assessed did not allow us to report on the anticipated clinical outcomes of 4Ms care, it does set up a foundation for evaluation of the 4Ms and EHR integration and dashboard development.
Conclusions
The VHA provides a comprehensive spectrum of geriatrics services and innovative models of care that often serve as exemplars to other health care systems. Implementing the AFHS framework to assess and act on the 4Ms provides a structure for confronting the HCP shortage with geriatrics expertise by infusing geriatrics knowledge, skills, and practices throughout all care settings and disciplines. Enhancing patient-centered care to older veterans through AFHS implementation exemplifies the VHA as a learning health care system.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Veterans Health Administration Office of Geriatrics and Extended Care and the clinical staff from the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Healthcare System and the Birmingham Veterans Affairs Health Care System for assisting us in this work.
