And to truly provide care for the elderly requires a continuum of acute and long-term community care.
Geriatric medicine needs to be interwoven with expertise from many disciplines.
Levkoff, an HMS associate professor in social medicine and the principal investigator of the planning grant, and Barbara Berkman , associate director of the geriatric education center and director of social work research at Massachusetts General Hospital, will coordinate the planning process. No one has a real understanding of the role each other plays. The ethical issues of delivering geriatric primary care will be emphasized. Levkoff and Berkman selected Beth Israel Healthcare and Massachusetts General Hospital and its affiliates as the initial institutions to demonstrate their new model.