Meet the West Health Accelerator Team: Andrea Wershof Schwartz, MD
As a geriatrician, Dr. Andrea Schwartz has spent her career advocating for age-appropriate care for older adults. In her role as the education strategy lead for the West Health Champions program at Mass General Brigham, she is helping to design and lead the education curriculum that empowers clinicians to deliver person-centered, evidence-based care to older adults.
The West Health Champions program is one of four key focus areas of the West Health Accelerator at Mass General Brigham, a collaboration between Mass General Brigham and the West Health Institute that is transforming healthcare for older adults.
Q&A
How did you become so passionate about caring for older adults?
Andrea Schwartz: I've always loved spending time with older adults and hearing their stories. During my medical training, I saw how our well-intentioned medical care can sometimes lead to complications for older adults and lead them farther away from their goals and what matters to them. So, my whole career has been devoted to spreading geriatric education principles and trying to make it easier for clinicians to do the right thing for older patients. For the last two years, I've led the geriatric curriculum at Harvard Medical School, making sure that every doctor, no matter their field, learns the “geriatric four Ms,” which include mobility, mentation, medication, and what matters.
How are you bringing your knowledge and passion to the West Health Champions program?
AS: The West Health Champions are a network of on-the-ground clinician leaders we are training to implement age-appropriate protocols and best practices across the Mass General Brigham system.
My team is providing the Champions with a solid foundation in evidence-based principles of geriatric care that they can implement and share with their teams. Our goal is to ensure that every clinician at Mass General Brigham has the skills they need to deliver age-appropriate care to help our older adult patients do more of what matters to them.
We are also providing them training in quality improvement (QI) principles, which the Champions will use to initiate QI projects at their site. These projects are testing potential models of care, so we can learn from one another and pilot and scale the best ideas across our system.
Our Champions and site leads have demonstrated such incredible passion and excitement about increasing their knowledge in geriatric care, and in bringing that knowledge back to their team to help make the system better. That’s been so inspiring to see, because they are an interprofessional group who work in many different hospital settings, and they are already having a tremendous impact.
What are the next steps for the West Health Champions?
AS: This fall, our Champions are submitting proposals for their QI projects, which are based on understanding the current baseline metrics that we hope to improve through the West Health Accelerator.
The Champions are working with our team of QI experts to develop projects that help our older patients get through hospitalization with a lower risk of complications and a higher chance of getting back to doing what matters to them. We want to make changes in the way we deliver care in the hospital so that our patients can leave as strong, or even stronger, than when they came in. We’re really excited about the ideas the Champions have brought to us, and we look forward to working with them to develop those ideas.
Why is the work of the Accelerator so crucial right now?
AS: As our population ages and older adults make up a disproportionately high number of our hospitalized patients, there's really an urgent need to transform our health system to deliver care that addresses the needs of older adults. This means that care is aligned with what matters to our patients. The Accelerator is an incredible example of bringing together interprofessional teams and building off existing programs to ensure that all our older patients receive care that is tailored to them.
How do you believe the Accelerator will change the landscape of care for older adults throughout the country?
AS: I believe the West Health Accelerator at Mass General Brigham is uniquely positioned to change the landscape of care for older adults. We are building on Mass General Brigham’s reputation for excellence to show what team-based geriatric care can look like when it's centered on what matters to older adults. We hope to model for other health systems how to engage frontline clinicians and learn from their experiences to make the system better for every older adult who needs to be hospitalized. I feel so passionate about this work because it's a real opportunity for Mass General Brigham be a leader in showcasing what great geriatric care can look like in the hospital.