The John A. Hartford Foundation has announced six grants totaling more than $5.8 million in support of efforts to promote age-friendly care, support family caregivers, and increase access to serious illness care.

Recipients include the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Yale University, which were awarded a total of $1.6 million over two years to expand the education, practice support, and evaluation activities of the Geriatric Emergency Department Collaborative, a nationwide effort to improve the quality of care for older people in emergency departments; the Age-Friendly Institute, which was awarded $1.5 million in support of a three-year initiative to increase consumer understanding and drive demand for age-friendly care through a crowd-sourced online resource; and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which will receive nearly $1.48 million over three years for a demonstration project designed to increase the uptake and use of shared electronic health record access by family caregivers of older adults, evaluate its effects, and disseminate best practices to promote national adoption.

In addition, the foundation awarded $594,110 over two years to Health Careers Futures to implement an updated Teaching Nursing Home model in Pennsylvania to demonstrate how enhanced partnerships between academic nursing schools and skilled nursing facilities can improve quality and cost outcomes; $453,777 over fifteen months to the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution, which will work with diverse stakeholders to create an implementation and dissemination plan for recommendations to improve care for older adults; and $233,022 over eighteen months to FAIR Health to develop, test, and plan the dissemination of shared decision-making tools designed to help older adults and their family caregivers understand cost information for treatment options.

(Photo credit: Age-Friendly Institute)