The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health has awarded a 5-year, $5.5 million grant to create the Learning Health Systems Rehabilitation Research Network (LeaRRn).

The Mather Institute has awarded a 2020 bronze award to Clara Berridge (Author) and Julie Lima, Margot Schwartz, Christine Bishop, and Susan Miller (co-authors) for their publication funded through the NIA culture change grant. The title of their publication is "Leadership, Staff Empowerment, and the Retention of Nursing Assistants: Findings From a Survey of U.S. Nursing Homes." Their publication was published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association (JAMDA).

Our colleague, Andrew Zullo, PharmD, ScM, PhD, is a recipient of the American Geriatrics Society Health in Aging Foundation New Investigator Award.

The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), a national non-profit organization whose mission is to support and advance healthy aging through biomedical research, is proud to recognize the outstanding contributions of Kali Thomas, MA, PhD, with the inaugural Terrie Fox Wetle Rising Star Award in Health Services and Aging Research.

A blog post by Jill Harrison, executive director of the IMPACT Collaboratory, the joint award to Brown and Hebrew SeniorLife to fund and support non-drug dementia interventions, addresses the need for pragmatic clinical trials and the challenges in defining and implementing them.

Nina Joyce has received a 2020 Research Seed Award from Brown University. Here is a sample of the abstract:

Designed to recognize excellence in scholarship, the Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Awards fund exceptional faculty research projects. Here is a sample of the abstract:

The Administrative staff of the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research have won a 2019 Excellence Award for efficiency.

Susan Campbell, Project Coordinator, was a recipient for the 2019 RIPHA Lifetime Achievement Award for her significant contributions to the advancement of public health in academics, in Rhode Island and beyond.

Stefan Gravenstein, M.D. has accepted the position of Director of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital and The Miriam Hospital and at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice Linda Resnik will lead a three-year study funded by the U.S. Department of Defense that will examine the effectiveness of various prostheses.

Recipient: Clara Berridge, PhD, MSW, of the University of Washington.

Professor Shireman will succeed Richard W. Besdine, MD who has held the position for nearly two decades.

Advance-care planning (ACP) is the keystone of goal-concordant care, enabling patients to state their treatment preferences while they still have the mental capacity to do so. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has acknowledged this by accepting two reimbursement codes for these essential conversations. A study in JAMA Internal Medicine led by Professor Emmanuelle Belanger indicates ACP billing is growing significantly, although most of the physicians who are likelier to engage in these conversations still don’t use the codes, suggesting there are barriers to initiating these end-of-life talks, or documenting them, or both. A related commentary highlights tools for having more effective conversations.

Meals on Wheels might do more than deliver hot food to isolated seniors: New research suggests it can serve as an early warning system for declining health. The study, published recently in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, included Meals on Wheels drivers in Guernsey County in Ohio and San Diego County, who were trained to use a mobile app to alert care coordinators if the drivers had a concern or noticed a change in a senior's condition.

Speaking to a faculty, student, and lay audience at the annual University of Pennsylvania Charles C. Leighton Memorial Lecture, Brown University Professor Vincent Mor, PhD, sought to convey the sense of wonder and discovery he has often felt during his 40 years as a health care big data specialist.

Kali Thomas, Associate Professor, Health Services, Policy and Practice, Early Career Research Achievement Award.

The National Public Lecture Tour is a half-day event, consisting of a keynote address, followed by a panel discussion with three state-based experts, and concluded by a roundtable discussion in which all attendees can participate.

Richard Besdine, MD, Director, Center for Gerontology, looks back on a career dedicated to improving elder care. He established the first academic geriatrics fellowship in the country at Harvard. He was the founding director of the UConn Center on Aging and the first Travelers Professor of Geriatrics and Gerontology. He was also the first chief medical officer for the Health Care Financing Administration's Health Standards and Quality Bureau. In 2000, he became the inaugural David S. Greer, MD, Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Brown.

The Rhode Island Community-Academic Partnership for Behavioral Health (RICAP) will launch in February 2019 with funding from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.