Accelerating the pace of elder justice policy to meet the needs of a growing aging population.

Policy measures designed to address elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation date back to decades, including the Older Americans Act of 1965. Over the years, various legislative actions have aimed to address elder mistreatment, culminating in the Elder Justice Act of 2010. Despite these efforts, policy changes lag behind need, and government funding appropriation is woefully inadequate.

Developing a tool to assess and monitor institutional readiness to address elder mistreatment in hospital emergency departments.

Hospital emergency departments (EDs) lack the tools and processes required to facilitate consistent screening and intervention in cases of elder abuse and neglect. To address this need, the National Collaboratory to Address Elder Mistreatment has developed a clinical care model that ED's can implement to improve screening, referral, and linkage to coordinated care and support services for older adults who are at risk of mistreatment. To gauge ED readiness to change and facilitate adoption of the care model, we developed an organizational assessment tool, the Elder Mistreatment Emergency Department Assessment Profile (EM-EDAP).

Recommendations to Improve Payment Policies for Comprehensive Dementia Care.

Access to comprehensive dementia care is limited. Recent changes in billing for professional services, including new physician fee schedule codes, encourage clinicians to provide new services; however, current reimbursement does not cover costs for all needed elements of dementia care. The Payment Model for Comprehensive Dementia Care Conference convened more than 50 national experts from diverse perspectives to review promising strategies for payment reform including ways to accelerate their adoption.

Educating translational researchers in research informatics principles and methods: an evaluation of a model online course and plans for its dissemination.

Translational research generates and/or uses very large amounts of diverse data. Informatics principles and methods address datasets that are large and complex, whereas few translational researchers know these principles and methods and many cannot design, carry out, or analyze the results of these studies optimally. With few exceptions, informatics education has not been directed to researchers, especially established researchers.