Leveraging the Elder Mistreatment Emergency Department Toolkit to Meet CMS’s Age-Friendly Hospital Measures

TL;DR

This paper explains how a free toolkit can help hospitals meet new standards for age-friendly care by addressing social vulnerability and leadership in elder mistreatment.

Contribution

The paper introduces a practical, scalable solution using the EMED Toolkit to align with CMS’s Age-Friendly Hospital Measures.

Findings

The EMED Toolkit aligns with CMS’s social vulnerability and leadership domains.

The Toolkit integrates into hospital workflows to identify and address elder mistreatment.

It offers adaptability across healthcare settings and supports multidisciplinary teams.

Abstract

This year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) introduced an Age-Friendly Health Systems (AFHS) Hospital Measure to assess hospital commitment to providing care to older adult patients. The free, publicly available Elder Mistreatment Emergency Department (EMED) Toolkit—developed by the National Collaboratory to Address Elder Mistreatment—provides a system intervention that aligns with two of this Measure’s domains: social vulnerability and age-friendly care leadership. Utilizing the EMED Toolkit to address this new measure is an opportunity to integrate routine identification of elder mistreatment, robust tracking of referrals for positive screens, and strategic leadership to support these efforts. Beyond its validated screening instrument, the Toolkit integrates decision-support prompts, staff workflows, and community-referral pathways into standard hospital processes, ensuring that social-vulnerability assessments trigger evaluation and service linkage. This presentation will provide a detailed crosswalk of the Toolkit that demonstrates functions corresponding to CMS’s social vulnerability and age-friendly care leadership attestations. The presentation will also include examples demonstrating the EMED Toolkit’s adaptability to different healthcare settings, offering health systems a scalable solution. This free resource provides a roadmap to assist health systems in meeting requirements of the AFHS measure and provides a framework to develop a multidisciplinary response team, ultimately elevating the care provided to older adults.