Ronald J. Shumacher, MD, FACP, CMD, chief medical officer for Optum Care Services, discusses a recent study that looked specifically at inpatient utilization or hospitalization rates, transfers to the emergency department, and skilled nursing use patterns for long-term nursing home residents who…

Chris Caulfield, RN, chief nursing officer at IntelyCare, highlights factors that lead to burnout for nurses, the environment that encourages higher rates of burnout, and what facilities can do to combat burnout.

What happens in Long Term Acute Care Hospitals, or LTACHs (pronounced L-tacs)?  I've never been in one.  I've sent patients to them - usually patients with long ICU stays, chronically critically ill, with a gastric feeding tube and a trach for ventilator support.  For those patients, the goals (…

Ok, I'll admit it. When I hear the phrase "the biology of aging" I'm mentally preparing myself to only understand about 5% of what the presenter is going to talk about (that's on a good day).  While I have words like telomeres, sirtuins, or senolytics memorized for the boards, I've never been…

Geriatricians in the 2030s may be able to prescribe very costly medications for older Medicare beneficiaries who cannot get supper. Most older Americans who live with disabilities will not be able to pay for adequate housing, food, medicine, and personal care. All who serve older adults must…

You're the attending physician on a teaching service.  Your resident says we shouldn't order a CT because CT's are over-used for this condition, and represent overuse, waste, and low-value care.  In this case, however, you suspect that's not the resident's real reason.  The real reason behind the…

On this weeks podcast, we talk with Krista Harrison about the life of individuals living with moderate dementia, as well as what we know about their caregivers.  Krista is is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Geriatrics at UCSF, a social scientist, and something that we learned in this…

In this week's podcast we talk with Lew Cohen, MD, about his new book "A Dignified Ending: Taking Control Over How We Die."Eric and I approached reading this book with trepidation.  We feared it would be a polemic defending physician aid in dying.  It is not.  Dr. Cohen does not hide his beliefs…

Over lunch at a restaurant in Manhattan, my father and I talked about long-term care insurance and the emergence of senior centers and nursing homes across the U.S. that offer a variety of ethnic cuisines and cultural events, catering not only to a growing population of adults over 65, but also, to…

In this week's GeriPal podcast we talk with Stacy Fischer, MD and Regina Fink, RN, PhD, both from the University of Colorado, about a lay health navigator intervention to improve advance care planning with Latinos with advanced cancer.  The issue of lay health navigators raises several issues that…