Caregiving/Long Term Care/Aging COR

About This Grant

Background and Significance: In primary partnership with the Office of Geriatrics and Extended Care (GEC), Geriatrics and Extended care-focused Network to Enhance Research Across The Enterprise (GENERATE) has three priority areas in which it will support advancement: (1) Home care workforce and family caregivers, (2) Quality and access to facility-based long-term care, and (3) Aging in place. GENERATE is grounded in a learning health system conceptual framework and has the following three goals. Goal 1: Data Infrastructure. Support integration of caregiving, long-term care, and aging data by characterizing relevant data, measures, and sources; determining needs; and identifying priority areas to improve future research and policy. Goal 2: Evidence Curation. Characterize and curate current evidence from existing work related to caregiving, long-term care, and aging to identify research opportunities/gaps, engage marginalized groups, and support information exchange to move research findings into practice. Goal 3: Veteran Impact. Rapidly move caregiving, long-term care, and aging research into policy and practice through mentorship, response to ORD and legislative needs, and pilot grants. GENERATE is responsive to the VA national priority of greater choice for Veterans and addresses an ORD- wide priority to increase the real-world significance of VA research by developing products partners can immediately disseminate to the field. The impact of GENERATE’s activities will be to enable Veterans and families to have greater access to high quality home and long-term services to meet their needs as they age. Strategic Plan: Goal 1 activities will help understand current availability and use of data to drive better care for older Veterans and their caregivers, identify data and measurement gaps and opportunities for collaboration and further research, support operational partners’ data needs, and increase communication across shareholders to support enterprise-wide use. Goal 2 will help understand the landscape of current research on caregiving, long-term care, and aging to identify and support opportunities for research to move the needle forward. We will create structures and processes for information exchange to help move findings into practice. We will also engage traditionally marginalized groups, so nothing about them is done without them. Goal 3 activities will develop a mentorship program to connect senior and early career researchers. We will also create a rapid response team to help our partners respond to legislative and other requests. And we will actively solicit funds to support a potential pilot program to enable research to rapidly address known needs. Innovation: GENERATE forges unprecedented collaboration in caregiving/long-term care/aging, spanning across traditional research and operations silos to jointly move the needle forward on improving Veteran impacts. It uses a community-engaged approach to support novel and meaningful participation of marginalized populations whose perspectives are central to the caregiving, long-term care, and aging fields. Coordination, Collaboration, and Partnerships: The primary partner is GEC. GENERATE works with the HSR broad portfolio and will also partner with the Caregiver Support Program and, among others, the Offices of Care Management and Social Work, Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, and Primary Care, and Rural Health. GENERATE also collaborates with multiple existing groups, including but not limited to the Geriatrics Learning Health System QUERI, the Elizabeth Dole Center of Excellence for Veteran and Caregiver Research, and the Age-Friendly SOTA meeting committee, all of which also have investigators on GENERATE. Management Plan: GENERATE’s MPI team, led by Dr. Hartmann (Bedford) as Contact PI, also comprises Drs. Hastings (Durham), Hung (Bronx), and Mills (Providence). Investigators outside the MPIs’ facilities are as follows: Dr. Jacobs (Palo Alto), Dr. Leykum (San Antonio), Dr. Madrigal (Boston), and Dr. True (New Orleans).