Three Keys to Cross-Sector Age-Friendly Care

Nelson LH, Saret C. Improving Public Health and Health Care for Older Adults: The Three Keys to Cross-Sector Age-Friendly Care. Boston: Institute for Healthcare Improvement; 2023. (Available at ihi.org)

To reliably provide evidence-based care and services to every older adult at every interaction, health care and public health systems need to elevate healthy aging as a core function, with a foundational focus on equity.

Improving Public Health and Health Care for Older Adults: The Three Keys to Cross-Sector Age-Friendly Care Implementation Guide and Workbook contains resources to improve how public health and health care organizations work across the care continuum. The accompanying materials also provide guidance and specific recommendations to support efforts to provide age-friendly care to all older adults.

• Implementation Guide: Leverages cross-sector collaboration as a vital tool to bring together public health and health care organizations and other partners outside of these sectors across the care continuum. Some components of the framework presented in this guide may apply within one sector only, while others apply across multiple sectors, including health care, public health, and social services.
• Workbook: Takes organizations through how to test the change ideas, step by step.
• Care Journey Maps: Visual narratives depicting the multidimensional relationship between an individual and a service, centering the experience of the older adults and their caregivers to show the importance of acting on and assessing what matters to an older adult and to illustrate the complexity and impact of the current system.
• Driver Diagram, Change Ideas, and Measures

The framework presented in these materials, originally developed through a pilot project in Michigan, is intended to be adaptable to any community or state and can be customized based on the older adults within a geographic area.

This cross-sector work builds on the Age-Friendly Health Systems movement.