Ohio Health System Launches Aging Institute

ProMedica's initiative is designed to help the country rise to the challenge of the exploding senior population.

Toledo-based ProMedica launched an aging institute earlier this month.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has forecast meteoric growth in the country's senior population, which is expected to also drastically increase the number of Americans afflicted with chronic diseases. In 2015, 45 million adults were 65 or older, and that figure is anticipated to reach about 80 million by 2050, according to the CDC.

"We are going to have an explosion of people who are going to be in their 70s and 80s, and our national workforce is going to have a lot fewer young people compared to seniors," says Steve Cavanaugh, MBA, president of the HCR ManorCare division of ProMedica and a member of the leadership team at the new ProMedica Healthy Aging Institute.

The aging institute will be working in three core areas.

• Innovation and research: Identifying and developing new health and wellness models for the senior population
   
• Education and training: Preparing the next generation of administrators and clinicians to support all aspects of senior health and well-being such as continuing education for professionals in the senior care field
   
• Advocacy: Driving industry reform and supporting efforts to redesign healthcare for seniors

The long-term goal of the aging institute is to serve as a catalyst for change at a national level, Cavanaugh says.

"If you think about the current state of healthy aging and healthcare in general, despite all the work we have done the country's health system remains siloed. We still have a system that is anchored in fee-for-service, and we still have a model that is focused on the clinical aspects of care that ignores things like social determinants of health."

Innovation and research

The aging institute is being designed to generate evidence-based approaches addressing the challenges associated with the country's increasing senior population, Cavanaugh says.

"On the innovation and research side of the institute, we see opportunities to try some things with our own health system and provide some academic rigor on whether initiatives work and whether they can be applied across the country."

Education and training

The aging institute is not expected to provide training. Instead, the institute is expected to partner with other institutions to develop curricula to train the next generation of clinicians and healthcare professionals who work with elderly patients, he says.

"We are going to need a healthcare workforce that is more and more well versed in caring for seniors."

Administrative leaders will be another focal point of the aging institute's education and training efforts, Cavanaugh says.

"We are going to need leaders who know how to manage in the senior care space. Now, the leadership in healthcare is heavily weighted toward the hospital setting. As we shift away from hospitals to postacute care, we are going to need leadership that is more familiar with that setting of care."

Healthy aging advocacy

Entering the political arena is a necessary step toward improving care for seniors, he says.

"You can come up with the best public policy options available, but if you don't implement them through the regulatory and reimbursement systems in the political process you are not going to get the change that the country needs. We have a role to provide information and work with other parties to arm them with arguments for particular policy options that we view as beneficial for the country."

Seeking to end the practice of denying Medicare coverage for skilled nursing facility costs after an observation-status stay at a hospital is an example of the aging institute's advocacy role, Cavanaugh says.

"That might be a narrow issue where we can raise our hand with others in the near-term and say, 'It's not right. It's not good policy.'"