The Roles and Value of Geriatricians in Healthcare Teams: A Landscape Analysis

There are concerns about the growing shortage of geriatricians to serve the population of older people in the U.S. With too few geriatricians to care for the entirety of the geriatric patient population, understanding how to best leverage geriatricians as members of an overall care team is needed. The current roles of geriatricians, how they collaborate with other health professionals, and how their work is changing has not been succinctly described or summarized. In this 2-stage project we examine current and emerging roles of geriatricians as members of healthcare teams across different care settings.

The first stage involves a comprehensive landscape analysis derived from scholarly work that assesses how geriatricians are integrated into healthcare teams and how care is delivered to the geriatric population in different types of healthcare delivery systems. This report is a summary of the stage 1 findings. A second phase, expected to be completed in 2018, will enrich this analysis by gathering new data from interviews with healthcare executives, managers, and geriatricians.