The John A. Hartford Foundation has announced five grants totaling $4.8 million to close gaps in the delivery of quality care to older adults.

The grants include more than $1.5 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine ($939,568 over three years), the Home Centered Care Institute ($454,779 over three years), and the American Academy of Home Care Medicine ($150,000 over two years) in support of the Moving and Scaling Home-Based Primary Care initiative, which aims to improve the health of the most frail and vulnerable elders by increasing access to and the quality of home-based primary care. The initiative's work involves three components: the development of a data registry that will make it easier to measure the quality of these services and move toward value-based payment for home-based primary care; the creation of training curricula and educational programming for use in building and strengthening the primary care workforce; and the development and dissemination of information about payment models for these services.

In addition, the foundation awarded nearly $2.5 million over three years to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation to establish a top-tier reporting desk that builds awareness and understanding of geriatric care issues among the public, policy makers, and the healthcare sector; $211,415 over three years to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in support of a program to promote and accelerate implementation of recommendations from the 2014 Institute of Medicine report Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life; and $500,000 over two years to the Center for Medicare Advocacy to reduce, through outreach and education, the negative impact of the "observation status" classification on older hospitalized adults.

The foundation also awarded a grant of $100,170 to the Santa Fe Group in support of its efforts to create an inter-professional mix of individuals, institutions, agencies, and organizations that will execute a multi-pronged strategy aimed at expanding dental coverage for older adults, with a focus on expanding coverage under Medicare Part B and within Medicare Advantage programs.