After successfully hardwiring evidence-based best practices for older adults into Mass General Brigham’s electronic health record (EHR), the West Health Accelerator at Mass General Brigham is now sharing its tools and lessons learned with health systems across the country. The American Hospital Association (AHA) learning collaborative, Adopting Digital Tools for Better Aging Care, launched in June 2026 to give Mass General Brigham experts a platform for sharing practical tools, implementation guidance, and lessons learned about improving care for adults ages 65 and older.
“MGB did all this work and documented all the steps in the process to make it easier for other hospitals to do the same work without needing as robust of a team to implement it,” explains Evelyn Brady, program implementation and evaluation manager at West Health.
Practical Implementation Guidance
Adopting Digital Tools for Better Aging Care is free and open to hospitals outside of AHA’s membership. The learning collaborative helps its 145 participants — representing 45 hospitals and 29 health systems — adapt Mass General Brigham’s work to their own care environments, workflows, and resources. Through six sessions over six months, participants receive guidance on the following four components of the Accelerator and must commit to starting the adoption process for at least one component:
1. Potentially inappropriate medications (PIMs): Reducing default doses of PIMs, removing PIMs from selected order sets and creating medication flags for older adults.
2. Age-based orders: Embedding age-appropriate practices within default physician orders.
3. Nursing geriatric plan of care: Supporting safe, effective care for older adults through automatically populated, age-aligned nursing plans.
4. After-visit summary: Reducing manual work for clinicians by generating automatically populated, age-aligned discharge summaries.
“Not every tool makes sense for every hospital or health system, so they can pick which ones make sense within their workflows,” says Brady. Early feedback shows strong alignment with the Accelerator’s model, with 96% of participants seeing its EHR-enabled strategies as key to improving outcomes, and 52% expressing interest in adopting all four components.
Each of the six sessions focuses on a different topic, from identifying and hardwiring high-impact changes like medication safety to securing clinician buy-in, communicating changes, implementation strategies, and evaluating and sustaining impact.
Participants receive practical information and exercises they can bring back to their organizations, and can work through any challenges during additional office hours and informal check-ins. Stacy Pevney, MPH, associate director at the West Health Institute, says that the learning collaborative is about giving other institutions a flexible foundation to build on: “We’re not just handing them a playbook and saying good luck.” The video conference format also allows participants at different stages of adoption to learn from each other, sharing obstacles and approaches that have worked at their institutions.
During the fourth session, Medication Safety: Build and Hardwiring, Lynne O’Mara, MBA, MPAS, e-care clinical director of the Accelerator, led a discussion on securing leadership and clinical approval for safer prescribing, sharing the Accelerator’s approach to engaging experts, preserving clinician autonomy, and aligning the work with institutional patient safety priorities.
Sharing the Work Beyond the Collaborative
Brady says that seeing the Accelerator’s work expand to other hospitals has been rewarding for the entire team: “It’s very fulfilling to be part of a program that we’ve seen move from implementation and early results to scaling much faster than it would have without a collaborative,” she says.
The AHA plans to make session recordings and tools available to the public after the collaborative concludes in November 2026. “Seeing hospitals across the country adopt these tools through the learning collaborative demonstrates the value of the hard work Mass General Brigham went through,” says Pevney. “But the scaling and sharing of tools, resources, and lessons learned don’t stop after this collaborative. This is just the beginning of bringing the model to health systems across the country.”