Age-Friendly Health Systems: A Guide to Using the 4Ms While Caring for Older Adults

According to the US Census Bureau, the US population aged 65+ years is expected to nearly double over the next 30 years, from 43.1 million in 2012 to an estimated 83.7 million in 2050. These demographic advances, however extraordinary, have left our health systems behind as they struggle to reliably provide evidence-based practice to every older adult at every care interaction.

Age-Friendly Health Systems is an initiative of The John A. Hartford Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), in partnership with the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA), designed Age-Friendly Health Systems to meet this challenge head on.

Age-Friendly Health Systems aim to:

• Follow an essential set of evidence-based practices;
• Cause no harm; and
• Align with What Matters to the older adult and their family caregivers.

Terry Fulmer, PhD, RN, FAAN, is the President and chief strategist of The John A. Hartford Foundation in New York City, a foundation dedicated to improving the care of older adults. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and recently served on the independent Coronavirus Commission for Safety and Quality in Nursing Homes established to advise the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Dr. Fulmer is the recipient of prestigious awards, including the American Society on Aging's 2017 Rosalie S. Wolf Award for her body of work on elder abuse. She has held faculty appointments at Columbia University, where she was the Anna C. Maxwell Chair in Nursing, and she has also held appointments at Boston College, Yale University, and the Harvard Division on Aging at Harvard Medical School. She has served as a visiting professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania and Case Western Reserve University.Dr. Fulmer has authored over 150 peer-reviewed papers and edited 10 books and her work is for better care of older adults is catalyzing the Age-Friendly Health Systems social movement.