What the VA can teach us about geriatric care.

The innovation now being demanded by Medicare is creating new opportunities for health care organizations to redesign how they deliver care for elderly people. For many years, the VA Health System has experimented with ways to deliver care more effectively and efficiently. Hospital-based postacute and palliative care and home-based primary care are two examples of successful approaches that non-VA providers should be looking at as they move away from fee-for-service reimbursement and invent new care-delivery models.