Southcentral Foundation’s Aging Well Initiative

Care across the spectrum of life is something Southcentral Foundation emphasizes. It is never too early, nor too late, to support customer-owners in realizing physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness. The previous blog entry discussed SCF’s New Generations project, for families and children, but SCF also has initiatives geared toward older adults. One such initiative is SCF’s Aging Well program.

The Aging Well program uses the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s evidence-based 4M model. The four essential elements of an age-friendly health system are known as the 4Ms:

• What Matters: Align care with each older adult’s specific health outcome goals and care preferences, such as end-of-life care.
• Medication: Use age-friendly medication that does not interfere with what matters to the older adult, mobility, or mentation.
• Mentation: Prevent, identify, treat, and manage dementia, depression, and delirium.
• Mobility: Ensure older adults move safely every day in order to maintain function and do what matters.

This initiative aims to standardize screening and evaluation processes, improve documentation and data tracking, and increase collaboration across the system. It also encourages partnership between integrated care teams, customer-owners, and their support to co-create a care plan tailored to what matters most to the customer-owner. Thanks to the attention paid to quality of care, SCF’s Anchorage Native Primary Care Center has received IHI’s Age-Friendly Health System Participant recognition for the work done to support older adult customer-owners.

For more information on SCF’s Aging Well initiative, or any other aspect of SCF’s Nuka System of Care, please contact the SCF Learning Institute.