AdventHealth Hendersonville Selected for Nationwide Collaborative to Accelerate System-Wide Spread of Age-Friendly Care for Older Adults

June 17, 2024 — AdventHealth Hendersonville Selected for Nationwide Collaborative to Accelerate System-Wide Spread of Age-Friendly Care for Older Adults

HENDERSONVILLE, NC, June 13, 2024 – AdventHealth Hendersonville is proud to announce its selection for participation in the Age-Friendly System-Wide Spread Collaborative. This first-of-its-kind Collaborative, led by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), has selected 30 US health systems that will accelerate and spread adoption of evidence-based, high-quality care for older adults across all of their sites and care settings.

The Collaborative is the latest endeavor of the Age-Friendly Health Systems initiative, which is based on a series of practices focused on addressing four essential elements of care (4M’s) for older patients:

• What Matters: Know and align care with each older adult’s specific health outcome goals and care preferences, including but not limited to end-of-life care, and across settings of care.
• Medication: If medication is necessary, use Age-Friendly medications that do not interfere with What Matters to the older adult, Mobility, or Mentation across settings of care.
• Mentation: Prevent, identify, treat, and manage dementia, depression, and delirium across settings of care.
• Mobility: Ensure that older adults move safely every day in order to maintain function and do What Matters.

AdventHealth Hendersonville was the first health system in North Carolina to participate in the Age-Friendly Initiative. It earned the initiative’s Committed to Care Excellence designation in 2020 after demonstrating its commitment to care for older adults at AdventHealth Medical Group locations across Western North Carolina. Now, during the 18-month Collaborative, AdventHealth Hendersonville will build on its progress and test changes to ensure the 4M’s are provided equitably as a standard practice for older adults receiving care across its entire system. All participating teams in the Collaborative will learn from each other and expert faculty and be among the first health systems to achieve an ambitious new IHI recognition for system-wide spread of Age-Friendly care.

“As an early adopter of the Age-Friendly initiative, AdventHealth Hendersonville is a national leader in the program. We are excited for this Collaborative to allow us to share our experiences providing the 4Ms to our patients and their caregivers, as well as other best practices we have developed that continue to enhance the comprehensive, compassionate care for our community,” explained geriatrician, Anna Hicks, MD, Administrative Director for Age-Friendly Services for AdventHealth Hendersonville. “Participation in this Collaborative will put us in a position to increase the spread of Age-Friendly Health care not only to the communities we serve, but also nationally.”

Since 2018, the movement has recognized 3,907 care settings as Age-Friendly, benefiting 3.29 million older adults who have received Age-Friendly care centered around what matters to them and their families. Age-Friendly Health Systems is an initiative of The John A. Hartford Foundation and IHI, in partnership with the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA).

For more information on Age-Friendly care at AdventHealth Hendersonville, please visit AdventHealthNC.com/Age-Friendly or call Call855-774-LIFE (5433).