Implementing Models of Geriatric Care—Behind the Scenes

Abstract

Innovative geriatric clinical programs have proliferated in the 21st century, and many have been highlighted in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS). The Affordable Care Act has supported the accelerated innovation of publicized and unpublicized program development, adaptation, and implementation. Many JAGS articles report work conducted in programs with significant improvements in quality; high satisfaction for patients and providers; and for some, reductions in costs. Despite considerable detail, enabling implementers to attempt to adopt reported programs or adapt them to local environments, much less is typically conveyed about the subtleties of the implementation process that led to a successful outcome. Moreover, where we have been given a window into successful initiatives, far less is known about those that failed and even less about why some succeeded but others failed. With a focus on our shared needs as a geriatrics community, to foster the exchange of more‐comprehensive models of successful and failed implementation, we propose publications that address implementation itself—a second layer of reporting about the “hidden” elements that may have been decisive factors in taking an efficacious test, treatment, or model and putting it into real‐world practice. We propose a new platform for sharing a broader range of healthcare quality improvement initiatives—successes and failures. We include several salient characteristics that could be measured and described in support of dynamic, sustainable, evidence‐based implementation of geriatrics programs.