University of Arizona geriatrician Mindy Fain, MD, is quoted as president of the American Academy of Home Care Medicine in a new report from The Commonwealth Fund that supports home-based primary care as a more comprehensive, less expensive and compassionate way to handle health care needs of patients who suffer from severe or chronic illness, frailty or functional limitations.
Dr. Fain is a professor of medicine, associate professor of nursing, chief of the Division of Geriatrics, General Internal Medicine and Palliative Medicine, co-director of the UA Center on Aging and the Anne and Alden Hart Endowed Chair in Medicine at the University of Arizona.
An outspoken advocate of home-based primary care, she has supported legislative and other efforts to create and expand related programs to encourage such practices, including U.S. Congressional funding for a pilot Independence At Home Program that she hopes will be made permanent. The program has bipartisan support as wide ranging as U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
The Commonwealth report, “An Overview of Home-Based Primary Care: Learning from the Field,” was released on June 7. You can see the report as well as a fact sheet (“Issue Brief”) and appendix at this link. There’s also a link to an article, “High-Needs Patients in Their Own Words.”
Dr. Fain notes that, with mortality rates as high as 25 percent a year for homebound patients, it’s important to include palliative care and end-of-life planning as part of home-based primary care practices—including hospice care in the final six months.
She adds that committed training programs and higher salaries for these physicians are necessary to “show young health providers that this is a viable career path.”
In the Commonwealth report, Dr. Fain noted her support of the Independence At Home Program was accentuated because it allows each program the flexibility to develop the model to serve their patients in a way that made sense locally. She gave as an example use of paramedic training and telemedicine to extend treatment reach in Southern Arizona.
A recent pilot project of another UA geriatrician Monica Vandivort, MD, to launch a collaborative multi-agency training and cooperative effort to better serve elderly patients in Cochise County was recently funded by the Arizona Area Health Education Centers to that end. (See a link to an article on the topic at the bottom of this page.)
The Commonwealth Fund, which has offices in New York and Washington, DC, is a private foundation that aims to promote a high performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society's most vulnerable that includes low-income people, the uninsured, minority Americans, young children and elderly adults. It does this by supporting independent research and making grants to improve health care practice and policy. Learn more: www.commonwealthfund.org
ALSO SEE:
“AzAHEC Grant to Improve Training, Education and Coordination among Cochise County Elderly Care Providers” | Posted May 21, 2017
"Two Tucson Med Students Bring UA Scholarship Awards in Aging Research to Thirty in a Decade" | Posted April 28, 2017
“AZPM Film ‘Passing On’ Wins Emmy Recognition as NATAS 2016 Board of Governors’ Awardee” | Posted Aug. 21, 2016
“UA Geriatrics, Palliative Care Chief Supports U.S. Senate Bid to Advance At-Home Primary Care” | Posted July 25, 2016