Sustainability and scalability of the hospital elder life program at a community hospital.

The Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP), an effective intervention to prevent delirium in older hospitalized adults, has been successfully replicated in a community teaching hospital as a quality improvement project. This article reports on successfully sustaining the program over 7 years and expanding its scale from one to six inpatient units at the same hospital. The program currently serves more than 7,000 older patients annually and is accepted as the standard of care throughout the hospital.

Replicating the Hospital Elder Life Program in a community hospital and demonstrating effectiveness using quality improvement methodology.

Objectives: To evaluate a replication of the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP), a quality-improvement model, in a community hospital without a research infrastructure, using administrative data.

Design: A pretest/posttest quality-improvement study.

Setting: A 500-bed community teaching hospital in western Pennsylvania.