Circle of care for healthy aging
When patients and physicians truly connect, lives change for the better. UTHealth Houston Institute on Aging leverages technological advances and university-wide partnerships to support a continuum of care that helps older adults thrive.
As artificial intelligence finds applications from stock trading to online shopping, researchers at UTHealth Houston Institute on Aging are harnessing its potential to help older adults—one of the many ways the institute joins with philanthropic partners to develop age-appropriate care.
This particular initiative focuses on enhancing an alternative model of care for older adults, called Patient Priorities Care. Led by Aanand D. Naik, MD, Executive Director of the Institute on Aging, and Rafael Samper-Ternent, MD, PhD, Director of the Clinical Research and Innovations Core at the institute, the evidence-based model features a website designed for patients and their families to designate their own health priorities, helping clinicians deliver care tailored to those needs.
The Institute on Aging is improving the website to allow AI adaptations, which will include more realistic engagement with users, potentially through a computer-generated image of a physician or nurse. The upgrade will also embed the website’s output into UT Physicians’ electronic health record—allowing physicians to easily access information about patients’ health priorities—and support cultural and language translation.
“We see this as an important tool to help older adults achieve the results they want from their health care,” Samper-Ternent says. “Technology is opening new opportunities to deliver age-appropriate care, and we want to take advantage of those.”
The Institute on Aging functions as a partnership among all schools at UTHealth Houston. Working in concert with the Joan and Stanford Alexander Division of Geriatric and Palliative Medicine at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston and leveraging strategic clinical and hospital partnerships, the institute pursues research and programs that empower healthy aging while disseminating knowledge and innovations directly to the community.
“The institute serves as a bridge across UTHealth Houston’s schools and disciplines, allowing us to do more as a university than any individual school or department can do on their own,” Naik says.
Researchers focus on solutions that address common and pressing needs, such as mitigating the risk for falls, coordinating care across providers, and—in the most recent initiative—helping older adults take greater charge of the direction of their health care.
A major focus of aging research involves the Texas Elder Abuse and Mistreatment Program (TEAM), a partnership between UTHealth Houston and the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. TEAM consists of four multidisciplinary areas of focus that work together to improve the lives of abused, neglected, and exploited elders, preventing abuse in communities in Texas and beyond. Some of the program’s current work focuses on self-neglect among older adults and its ties to loneliness and social isolation, with the goal of developing effective interventions.
“When I first started doing assessments for self-neglect, I met really amazing people with great stories who had fallen on hard times,” says Jason Burnett, PhD, Director of TEAM, “I realized there’s so much more to be done.”
Philanthropic support of the institute’s research fills important roles in the discovery process, such as providing seed funding for promising ideas that need proof-of-concept studies before they can attract larger grants. Philanthropy also helps junior researchers who do not have established sources of funding jumpstart their scientific careers.
“We appreciate the generosity of our donors who help make our work possible,” Naik says. “They are a part of every discovery we make and every life those discoveries improve.”