Center for Aging & Disability Education and Research to Participate in PCORI Grant; Partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital

BUSSW’s Center for Aging & Disability Education and Research (CADER) will work in partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital on a three-year, $1.9 million PCORI grant.  The grant focuses on “Acute Community Care to Avoid Unnecessary Emergency Department Visits,” and examines a new Massachusetts acute community care program–a collaboration between the EasCare ambulance service provider and Commonwealth Care Alliance, which serves adults who have both Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

Acute community care programs are currently being explored in other countries, where, similiar to the United States, emergency departments are overburdened. This expiriment utilizes highly trained paramedics to treat urgent care patients within their home or institutional residences when medically appropriate. In addition to traveling in SUVs with extensive medical supplies, medications, and special diagnostic testing equipment, such parademics also have access to patients’ electronic health records.

BUSSW professors Scott Geron and Bronwyn Keefe will work with an interdisciplinary group of clinicians and researchers, including Harvard researchers at MGH, UMass Survey Research group, the BU School of Public Health Data Control Center, Michael Shwartz at BU Questrom, and the Commonwealth Care Alliance. Geron and Keefe’s work will focus on developing measures of competency assessment for the paramedics, interviewing consumers, family members, paramedics and providers during the evaluation to collect patient-reported experiences and reactions to the program, and assisting with other related research and analysis tasks.

For more information on CADER at BUSSW, click here.