For someone who may be newer to this work, can you tell us a little bit about age-friendly care and how you have seen age-friendly health systems and the movement evolve?

Thanks, Kristen.

I could not be happier to be here talking about this today.

Age-friendly care really comes from an initiative that we started called Age-Friendly Health Systems, which is a national movement to improve both the quality and the safety of care for older people.

We're really pleased to have the American Hospital Association as one of our lead partners in this whole movement, in addition to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

I'll note that age-friendly care is grounded in the 4Ms framework, and you referenced those 4Ms already.

They are what matters, medications, mentation, and mobility.

Why is this the right moment to create an Age-Friendly Healthcare Impact Award? What motivated and why do you feel like now is the time to recognize this work across the field?

So can you talk to us about, and this is kind of hearkening back to another episode we had in the series around technology, AI, where do you see technology actually helping caregivers and older adults that we should kind of lean into? Because I've just given an example of something that I did not feel was super helpful.

That's a great point, and there's so much innovation that's happening right now in the tech space for caregivers and for older adults.

And the previous episode you referenced where Dr.

Mate noted i- in the AI episode of this podcast series, there are remote care and healthcare tools that began expanding during COVID that are helping older people and their caregivers to get care in the home.

That's one place that I would say it's, it's not appropriate for everyone who's in a real acute hospitalization, but for h- home-based primary care and for some certain conditions where even hospital-level care could be done at home, Hospital at Home is a fantastic program.

And they rely on tech that's not necessarily AI, but a lot of, you know, the virtual telehealth kinds of options.

There are also wearable devices that can provide monitoring for falls and for other health risks, and there's a whole fairly new set of smart home technologies that many of us use for convenience that can be life-changing, especially for a long-distance caregiver.

So how should someone start having this conversation, talking about aging, talking about long-term planning with a loved one?