Foundation wants better care for elders, poor

CNY Business Journal (1996+), May 13, 2005 by Tampone, Kevin

SYRACUSE - The Community Health Foundation of Western and Central New York is starting two programs aimed at improving care for some of the region's most vulnerable populations.

The initiatives are a quality-improvement collaborative for organizations that regularly deal with frail elders and a healthleadership fellows program focused on the leaders of organizations that serve both the elderly and impoverished children.

"These are populations that are dependent on the system for their well-being," says Ann Monroe, the foundation's president. "They need others to work and advocate for them because they can't do that for themselves."

The foundation is a private, charitable organization serving the eight counties around Buffalo arid the eight counties around Syracuse. Its mission is to improve the health and health care of people in these areas.

The foundation is accepting applications for the quality collaborative through July. Meetings will begin at the end of May, Monroe says. The effort is designed for nursing homes, home-health agencies, hospitals, and even public organizations that serve frail elderly clients.

Participants will be organized into teams that will come together to work on ways of improving elder care. Teams can focus on care transition, such as ways to improve accurate information flow between organizations when a patient is moved.

Other focus options are pain management, nutrition, medication management, and other topics usually associated with end-of-life issues, Monroe says.

Each of those broad areas could include many specific problems that a team could choose to investigate, Monroe says.

"You could have a team with a nursing home and a hospital on it that wants to focus on reducing unnecessary patient transfer," she says. "So they would focus on that, but you could have 20 other teams working on their own individual problems."

Teams will meet alone on a regular basis and will also come together two or three times over the course of the year-long project for meetings.

The idea, Monroe says, is to encourage the organizations that serve frail elderly clients to come together and work on innovative, creative ways to improve their operations. The groups can feed off each other's strengths and help each other generate ideas.

The foundation's other new effort, the health-leadership fellows program, will begin in October. The foundation is accepting applications now.

Monroe says she expects a class of about 25 to 30 health leaders from the foundation's 16-county area. Participants will come from health organizations serving either frail elders or impoverished children.

The course will last 18 months and consist of several multi-day sessions and outside work.

"One of the goals is to really build a network of people across the region who have had a common experience and can help lead health and health care for these vulnerable populations," Monroe says. "They could come from schools, public-health departments, nursing homes, hospitals, health plans. It's really a broad universe of people that could benefit from this program."

The program will focus on improving patient-centered care, teamwork among disciplines, evidence-based medicine, quality improvement, and use of information technology.

The hope, Monroe says, is that the overall care of elders and poor children will be improved by enhancing the skills of people leading the institutions who serve those groups.

The program is set to run at least twice, Monroe says.

"Hopefully, if it's popular, it can become a regular event," she says. "We hope it becomes a big part of training for healthcare leaders in the region."