Differentiating Between Home Care Types to Identify Older Adults at Risk of Adverse Health Outcomes in the Community.

Objectives: Acute hospitalization, recurrent admissions, institutionalization, and death are important adverse health outcomes. Older adults receiving home care are especially at risk of these outcomes, yet it remains unclear if this risk differs between older adults receiving different types of home care and older adults not receiving home care.

Design: Retrospective cohort study using national claims data from 2019.

Receiving home care forms and the risk for emergency department visits in community-dwelling Dutch older adults, a retrospective cohort study using national data.

Background: Older adults receiving home care have a higher risk of visiting the emergency department (ED) than community-dwelling older adults not receiving home care. This may result from a higher incidence of comorbidities and reduced functional autonomy in home care recipients. Since people receive different types of home care because of their different comorbidities and autonomy profiles, it is possible that distinguishing between the form of home care can help identify subpopulations with different risks for ED visits and help develop targeted interventions.

Implementing online group model building to unravel complex geriatric problems, a methodological description.

Background: Group model building (GMB), is a qualitative focus group like study design from the field of system dynamics, that leads a group of topic experts (often key stakeholders of a problem), through a set of scripted activities to create a conceptual model of their shared view on this problems' key contributing factors and their interactions. By offering a specific step wise approach to the complexity of a problem, GMB has provided better understanding and overview of complex problems across different scientific domains, in addition to traditional research methods. As the development of geriatric syndromes and organization of geriatric care are often complex issues that are difficult to research, understand and resolve, GMB might be a useful methodology to better address these issues.

A causal loop diagram of older persons' emergency department visits and interactions of its contributing factors: a group model building approach.

Purpose: Understanding the etiology of older persons' emergency department (ED) visits is highly needed. Many contributing factors have been identified, however, the role their interactions play remains unclear. Causal loop diagrams (CLDs), as conceptual models, can visualize these interactions and therefore may elucidate their role.

Reduced Waiting Times by Preference-Based Allocation of Patients to Nursing Homes.

Objectives: The long waiting times for nursing homes can be reduced by applying advanced waiting-line management. In this article, we implement a preference-based allocation model for older adults to nursing homes, evaluate the performance in a simulation setting for 2 case studies, and discuss the implementation in practice.

Design: Simulation study.