Despite the serious health consequences of elder mistreatment and self-neglect, we still know remarkably little about how affected older adults use the healthcare system. One major barrier has been the lack of large-scale data that connect information from Adult Protective Services (APS), which investigates elder mistreatment and self-neglect, with healthcare utilization.
I am excited to share that we have received a new R61 award from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to support our project, "Research Infrastructure to Provide Insight on Healthcare Utilization of Older Adults Exposed to Elder Mistreatment and Self-Neglect."
Through this project, we will create ACLink, a secure, multi-state research infrastructure linking APS data with Medicare and Medicaid claims. This novel resource will allow us to examine patterns of healthcare utilization among older adults experiencing elder mistreatment and self-neglect and lay the groundwork for future research aimed at improving their identification, intervention, and prevention.
I’m particularly excited about the potential for this infrastructure to open new avenues of research in a field where large-scale, longitudinal data have historically been extremely difficult to obtain.
Our research team includes investigators from UTHealth Houston (Zach Gassoumis) and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (Laura Keohane and Raymond Romano) as well as Weill Cornell Medicine (Yongkang Zhang and Fei Wang) -- We recently had an initial team meeting to discuss the project.
I’m tremendously grateful to the colleagues, collaborators, team members, and mentors who helped make this work possible, and to NIA for its continued support of our research program and commitment to improving the health and well-being of vulnerable older adults. Particular thanks to the External Advisory Board members for this project, our core program and grants team, and those who provided letters of support (all mentioned in the comments below!)
Looking forward to moving this work forward!
R61 AG104480
Project details here. LinkedIn post here.