Age-Friendly Health Systems Resources and News
Resources to Practice Age-Friendly Care
Numerous resources are available to help your team and organization practice age-friendly care and to guide your journey toward becoming an Age-Friendly Health System, including:
- Getting Started Guides
- Age-Friendly Health Systems Measurement
- NEW: CMS Age-Friendly Hospital Measure
- 4Ms Framework of an Age-Friendly Health System
- Making the Business Case for Age-Friendly Health Systems
- Working with Older Adults
- Case Studies
- Equity in Age-Friendly Care
- Additional Resources: IHI Insights, news and journal articles, and more
Getting Started Guides
Guide to Using the 4Ms in the Care of Older Adults in Hospitals and Ambulatory Practices
The guide is designed to help care teams test and implement a specific set of evidence-based, geriatric best practices called the "4Ms": What Matters, Medication, Mentation, Mobility.
Guide to Care of Older Adults in Nursing Homes
IHI, along with partner nursing homes, has developed the Age-Friendly Health Systems Guide to Care of Older Adults in Nursing Homes and companion document, Age-Friendly Health Systems Workbook for Nursing Homes Teams. The Guide presents a systems-based approach to implementing the 4Ms throughout the nursing home, and the Workbook is designed by and for point-of-care teams that interact with individual residents each day.
Guide to Recognition for Geriatric Emergency Department Accredited Sites
Geriatric Emergency Department Accredited sites are well aligned with 4Ms care. This guide provides an overview of each initiative, illustrates the overlap between them, and provides guidance on incorporating What Matters to older adults into Geriatric Emergency Department care.
Guide to Recognition for Geriatric Surgery Verification Hospitals
Geriatric Surgery Verification (GSV) Hospitals are well aligned with 4Ms care. This guide provides an overview of each initiative and illustrates the GSV Standards that meet the requirements for recognition as an Age-Friendly Health System when provided to adults ages 65+.
Guide to Using the 4Ms in the Care of Older Adults in the Convenient Care Clinic
This guide contains resources to help convenient care clinics implement the 4Ms (What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility) into their setting of care.
Guide to Using the 4Ms in the Care of Older Adults in Home Health
This guide contains resources to help home health implement the 4Ms (What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility) into their setting of care.
The Three Keys to Cross-Sector Age-Friendly Care
Improving Public Health and Health Care for Older Adults: The Three Keys to Cross-Sector Age-Friendly Care Implementation Guide and Workbook contains resources to improve how public health and health care organizations work across the care continuum. The accompanying materials also provide guidance and specific recommendations to support efforts to provide age-friendly care to all older adults.
Age-Friendly Health Systems EHR Implementation Guides
- Download the EHR Implementation Guide with Cerner Examples
- Download the EHR Implementation Guide with Epic Examples
- Download the Epic Implementation Guide
For feedback or questions about these guides, please email afhs@ihi.org.
Age-Friendly Health Systems Measurement
Age-Friendly Health Systems: Measures Guide
This document provides guidance on how to use and track a series of measures to help study your performance.
- Download the Measures Guide
- Video: Measuring the Impact of the 4Ms in Your System
- NCQA Article: A Core Measure Set For Age-Friendly Health Care Delivery
4Ms Evaluation Metrics Resource Library
Developed by the University of California San Francisco and a national Age-Friendly Health System Research Council, the 4Ms Evaluation Metrics Resource Library is a one-stop collection of 4Ms metrics compiled from the literature to help evaluators, researchers, implementers, and other stakeholders jump start their work to assess the impact of 4Ms implementation efforts. Metrics can be easily filtered by each of the 4Ms, measure type (e.g., process, outcome), clinical setting, data source, and subpopulations.
- Access the 4Ms Evaluation Metrics Resource Library
Cross-Setting Measurement Guide
The Comprehensive measurement guide has been created to reflect the measurement guidance contained in the guides for Hospital, Ambulatory, Nursing Home, Convenient care and Home care. It contains a comparison of the recommended measures for all settings that can currently be recognized by IHI (as of February 2025) and definitions of the measure for considerations by systems. Additionally, the guide builds on the guidance in the various AFHS Guides by adding in measures that we have gathered from systems looking to spread the 4Ms across their system and provides additional considerations for systems creating their own measurement dashboards to track the impact of the 4Ms on process and outcomes.
The guide has been created to provide a base for diverse systems to customize their own measures based on their internal systems. IHI will continue to review and revise the guide as required as we learn more from the increasing number of systems engaged in implementing the 4Ms in their system and tracking impact.
- Access the Cross-Setting Measurement Guide
Spreading Age-Friendly Care: From One Care Location to Reach Older Adults Across Your Health System
The guide will help health systems in spreading the 4Ms through all sites of care by discussing international effort and specific activities to reach this goal.
Read these IHI Insights posts to learn how different health systems have spread 4Ms care using the drivers or approaches outlined in the guide.
- Hartford HealthCare: Celebrate and tell your stories to drive spread
- University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: Calculate the financial impact of practicing the 4Ms
- Providence Health: Get specific about which health system priorities are advanced by the 4Ms
- MaineHealth: Gather evidence of impact during piloting of the 4Ms
NEW: CMS Age-Friendly Hospital Measure
This brief overview discusses why the measure matters, crosswalks the five domains of the measure to the 4Ms of the age-friendly care, includes a timeline of the measure, and shares resources.
CMS Age-Friendly Measure Completion Checklist
Use this example checklist from Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center as a starting point for documenting and monitoring progress towards attestation.
CMS, AHRQ, and UCSF on Advancing Age-Friendly Care
The recording of this October 2024 Friends of Age-Friendly Health Systems call is now available to view online or share with a colleague.
4Ms Framework of an Age-Friendly Health System
Making the Business Case for Age-Friendly Health Systems
Working with Older Adults
Case Studies
Equity in Age-Friendly Care
Additional Resources
Join Friends of Age-Friendly Health Systems
Receive updates on the Age-Friendly Health Systems movement, invites to quarterly webinars, access to experts, support on the 4Ms Framework, and more.
Join the Community