About Us

Would you like to contact us directly? Give us a call at 202-776-5183. Our general email address is [email protected]. Due to the heavy volume of electronic mail we may be unable to provide a personal reply to your messages.

Center for Elder Care & Advanced Illness
Altarum Institute
1200 18th Street NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20036

You can download a page of background information about the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness in PDF format.

MediCaring is the exciting idea that Americans can learn to build reliable, effective, and efficient arrangements for services to support one another when we must live with serious chronic conditions, mostly associated with older age or the last years of life — and that such a care system will be substantially different from what we have now.  We are working on policy, economics, professional development, public education, community demonstrations and a dozen other fronts to learn what works and to forge the commitment to change.  MediCaring is the goal of having a health care system in the United States that can find the patients who are living with serious and complex illness, mostly in the last years of life; can tailor services to their priorities, and can plan and pay providers in a way that encourages quality care at a price that is tolerable to the community.

In April 2011, the Partners for Patients initiative from HHS has helped to create an unusual opportunity to move ahead quickly on some very important aspects of service delivery for this phase of most lives, and for a broader population who are not quite so ill.  That initiative provides funds and technical support to encourage communities to improve transitions as chronically ill or disabled people move from one setting of care to another.  Since making transitions seamless requires having good care plans, community accord on sensible standard processes, self-care support and education for patients, and right-sized services for the local population, it turns out that work on care transitions provides substantial leverage on many aspects of improved services for persons living with serious chronic conditions.

Thus, we have focused this website on support for the ad hoc community of people working toward seamless care transitions, aiming to provide a number of tools that will help you get the information and insight you need, quickly and inexpensively.  Furthermore, we have constructed these tools to encourage contributions from all participants.  We are much smarter and more effective working together than in isolation.  Someone out there has thought about – and maybe even solved – the problem that is in your way.  Our tools will help you find one another or the best information on the web, and will help you help others.

Making care transitions work is largely about building effective communities.  We hope you will join in the community of experience that can make it happen in thousands of places in the next few years.

Medicaring.org is a service of Altarum Institute, a nonprofit health systems research and consulting organization (www.altarum.org). We are grateful that part of this work is supported by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund (www.commonwealthfund.org) and that Les Morgan of Growth House, Inc., (www.growthhouse.org) has graciously and skillfully anchored its development.

You can communicate with us at [email protected] or by using the comment box below.