天美传媒

A number of years ago, while making house calls as a nurse practitioner to homebound, low-income elderly patients in West Baltimore, Sarah Szanton noticed that their environmental challenges were often as pressing as their health challenges. Since then she has developed a program of research at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing on the role of the environment and stressors in health disparities in older adults, particularly those trying to 鈥渁ge in place鈥� or stay out of a nursing home. The result is a program called CAPABLE, which combines handyman services with nursing and occupational therapy to improve mobility, reduce disability, and decrease healthcare costs. She is currently examining the program's effectiveness through grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Innovations Office at the Center on Medicaid and Medicare Services. She is also conducting a study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, of whether food and energy assistance improve health outcomes for low-income older adults. A former health policy advocate, Dr. Szanton aims her research and publications toward changing policy for older adults and their families.

Dr. Hoffman is a health services researcher with interests in older adult health. His research focuses on quality of care and policies affecting older adults. Specific interests include the prevalence of and outcomes associated with fall injuries, implications of informal and formal caregiving for older adult prevention and health, dyadic relationships between family caregivers and care recipients, and how pay-for-performance programs influence care patterns, injuries, and health outcomes for older adults and their caregivers. Dr. Hoffman's work has been published in leading journals such as JAMA Network Open, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Medical Care, Medical Care Research and Review, Health Services Research, and The Gerontologist.

Sarita A. Mohanty, MD, MPH, MBA, serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of The SCAN Foundation. The SCAN Foundation is one of the largest foundations in the United States focused on improving the quality of health and life for older adults. Its mission is to advance a coordinated and easily navigated system of high-quality services for older adults that preserve dignity and independence. 

The SCAN Foundation has been a national leader in the development and scaling of person-centered care models for vulnerable adults with complex needs, including those served by Medicare and Medicaid. The foundation has been at the forefront of policy discussions regarding health care for older adults and coordinating services both for older adults and their caregivers.

Previously, Sarita served as the Vice President of Care Coordination for Medicaid and Vulnerable Populations at Kaiser Permanente. Sarita was previously Assistant Professor of Medicine at USC; Chief Medical Officer of COPE Health Solutions, a health care management consulting company; and Senior Medical Director at L.A. Care, the largest U.S. public health plan. Sarita was recently named a National Quality Forum (NQF) Quality Policy Fellow and has served on several NQF committees related to quality measurement. 

Sarita completed her Internal Medicine residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. She earned her MD from Boston University, MPH from Harvard University, and MBA from UCLA. She completed undergraduate work at UC Berkeley. She currently is an Associate Professor at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine and is a practicing internal medicine physician with Kaiser Permanente. Sarita enjoys international travel, tennis, and spending time with her husband and three children.

Dr. Raj’s research focuses on using patient and clinician perspectives to improve healthcare quality. She uses mixed methods approaches to study ways of integrating caregivers into health care teams for older adults and patients with cancer with the goal of improving the quality of care for patients and supporting well-being among caregivers. For example, she examines the potential for health information technologies to support caregiver inclusion in health care visits. Her research also explores the ethical and social implications of these different health information technologies, including privacy and trust implications of health information sharing.