There are insufficient numbers of practicing geriatricians to meet current demand for their services, and the shortage is projected to worsen in the coming decades as the number of older Americans rapidly increases. Understanding how to best leverage geriatricians as members of an overall care team is critical. This report is the second component of a two-stage project examining current and emerging roles for geriatricians. The first report, The Roles and Value of Geriatricians in Healthcare Teams: A Landscape Analysis, provided a comprehensive review of the current landscape, derived from scholarly work assessing the status of the geriatrician workforce, how healthcare organizations are currently utilizing geriatricians, and how the landscape is changing.
This study focuses on information solicited from leaders in geriatrics as to how different types of healthcare organizations utilize geriatricians and how geriatrician roles may evolve and new roles emerge as healthcare systems and organizations reorganize care in response to a changing environment.
Key Questions:
- How are different types of healthcare organizations utilizing geriatricians to maximize their expertise?
- How is value-based care influencing healthcare organizations’ use of geriatric care models?
- Are changes in how care to older adults is organized and delivered having an impact on fellowship training or professional development opportunities?
For questions, contact: Timothy Bates, MPP, Senior research analyst at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and the Healthforce Center at UCSF, [email protected]
Report:
UCSF Health Workforce Research Center authors Timothy Bates, MPP, Aubri Kottek, MPH, and Joanne Spetz, PhD have published their report: Geriatrician Roles and the Value of Geriatrics in an Evolving Healthcare System. There are insufficient numbers of practicing geriatricians to meet current demand for their services, and the shortage is projected to worsen in the coming decades as the number of older Americans rapidly increases. Interviews with field experts suggest that healthcare systems and organizations are reorganizing the delivery of geriatric care in ways that acknowledge the persistent shortage of geriatrician specialist physicians and seek to utilize this scarce resource to both amplify geriatricians’ expertise and provide higher quality, lower cost care. One of the key facilitators of this care transformation is the concept of geriatrics as a meta-discipline. Rather than a niche specialty practiced only by a small number of highly trained experts, geriatrics must be embraced by healthcare organizations as a set of principles that can inform all care provided to older adults, by all types of providers.
As value-based care continues to incentivize the adoption of innovative geriatric care models, organizations will rely on geriatricians to lead efforts to implement them. The expectation that geriatricians will play a key role in leading systemic transformation of older adult care raises important questions about the content of geriatrics fellowship training and other professional development opportunities. Field experts indicated that that fellowship programs could help prepare future leaders by incorporating experiences that allow fellows to deepen their knowledge of concepts such as population health, implementation science, healthcare financing, and practice model innovation. Programs should also offer mid-career professional development opportunities that utilize the executive MBA model to deliver content on these topics to practicing geriatricians and geriatrics fellowship-like content to non-geriatrician physicians.