The Institute has partnered with JAHF to establish a national collaborative of nine leading geriatric emergency medicine programs to provide early evidence that GED guideline-based care improves patient outcomes and is cost effective, as well as build a data infrastructure for ongoing research and evaluation.
Participating sites include: Mount Sinai Medical Center, St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Aurora Healthcare System, Magee Women’s Hospital, University of North Carolina, UC San Diego Health, Emory Grady Hospital and Yale University Hospital.
The first phase of the GEDC provided workforce training in the form of eight boot camp training conferences organized by GEDC faculty. Additionally, GEDC researchers generated early evidence demonstrating that a GED nurse intervention was associated with reduced risk of hospital admission at both initial ED visit and 30 days post encounter.
GEDC researchers also found that targeted evaluation by ED social workers for older patients is associated with reduced Medicare expenditures at 30 and 60 days post ED visit. These results have been presented at national conferences and published in scientific journals.
In 2018, a parallel research project leveraging the GEDC research data warehouse was awarded Federal funding by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). The Geriatric Emergency care Applied Research (GEAR) Network seeks to supplement the GEDC research data warehouse work by helping establish a standard set of criteria for data collection in areas related to GED. The NIA funding will also help support studies among GEDC sites, independent from the Institute.
In collaboration with the Institute’s Data Science team, the GEDC is also building a national research data warehouse for clinical research and benchmarking purposes. In 2018, the end-user interface was developed to allow external organizations access to the Institute’s secure Data Science platform. In 2019, the goal is to execute appropriate documentation (e.g. security, compliance and legal) and have three pilot sites transfer data to the research data warehouse.
Once the beta test is complete with the original three pilot sites, the remainder of 2019 will focus on transferring GED data from the remaining six core GEDC sites.