Emergency Department-to-Community Transitions of Care: Best Practices for the Older Adult Population

Abstract

This article describes emergency department (ED)-to-community care transitions for older adults and associated challenges, measurement, proven efficacious and effective interventions, and policy considerations. Older adults experiencing social isolation and impairments in functional status or cognition represent unique populations that are particularly at risk during ED-to-community transitions of care and may benefit from targeted intervention implementation. Future efforts should target optimizing screening techniques to identify those at risk, developing and validating patient-centered outcome measures, and using policy and reimbursement levers to include transitional care management services for older adults within the ED setting.

Keywords: Emergency department; Older adult; Transitions of care.

Fig. 1.

Conceptual model and framework for ED-to-community care transitions among older adults (From Gettel CJ, Serina PT, Uzamere I, et al. Emergency department-to-community care transition barriers: A qualitative study of older adults. J Am Geriatr Soc. Published online July 2, 2022. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jgs.17950. With permission.)