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UC Law San Francisco (UC Law SF) is providing training to health care teams across the country in how to identify and respond to financial and social vulnerability of older adults in order to improve their health.
Clarity Pro (pro.planforclarity.org) provides users with learning pages, care navigation tools, training resources and more. Hospitals can leverage Clarity Pro in their age friendly strategy, to help improve patient care for older adults and meet key CMS Age-Friendly Hospital Measure domains, including:
- Eliciting patient healthcare goals
- Frailty screening and intervention
- Patient vulnerability
- Age-Friendly Care Leadership
Starting this year, the federal government requires hospitals to track and report on social vulnerability of their older patients as a condition of federal funding. But how prepared are hospitals to track and actually respond to these needs?
A team at UC Law SF is on a mission to help them and, with support from AARP Foundation, has developed a free online tool and suite of trainings. The tool – called Clarity Pro – helps hospitals understand and address common social and financial vulnerabilities of their older patients, such as the cost of care, nutrition benefits, caregiver leave, and housing stability. The tool provides curated resources drawn from the aging network and legal aid, teaching users how to find financial and legal help for older adults and their families.
“Hospitals are often the first or only place older adults can go for help, but many of their care needs really require social or legal care, not medical care. Hospitals teams aren’t normally trained to talk about these issues with patients or know how to navigate resources. With a little training, they can be effective at addressing social drivers of their patients’ health and preventing downstream harms, such as housing loss or conservatorship” said Professor Sarah Hooper, who co-directs the Clarity project and leads the UCSF-UC Law SF Consortium on Law, Science & Health Policy.
Clarity Pro is a sister website to PlanforClarity.org, an educational tool developed for older adults and caregivers, that was funded by a grant from the National Institutes on Aging. Clarity and Clarity Pro are both 50-state tools that aim to educate and connect older adults and the people who support them, caregivers and health care professionals, with resources to support healthy aging. “Thanks to AARP Foundation, Clarity and Clarity Pro are free to users. We wanted to make it as easy and inexpensive as possible to help older adults and caregivers as they age,” said Prof. Hooper.