My Health Priorities is a free, online self-assessment tool that guides older adults and care partners through steps to identify what matters to them. A new community toolkit empowers senior centers and other community organizations to host presentations and discussions about identifying priorities related to health, health care, and social supports.
What Matter Most to Older Adults
The Age-Friendly Health Systems movement now encompasses more than 5,500 hospitals and health care systems, including VA medical centers, community care centers, and long-term care facilities. These care settings have embraced the implementation of core geriatric strategies focusing on the Age-Friendly 4Ms Framework: What Matters Most: Medication, Mobility, and Mentation (thinking, memory, reasoning, and perception). The goal: help older adults get care that better aligns with their unique health priorities and needs.
What Matters Most is the key to decision-making about medications, mobility, and mentation and is the first step in offering age-friendly care. Yet What Matters Most can sometimes be difficult to define for older adults as well as their doctors and other health care professionals. Patient Priorities Care and My Health Priorities are solutions to clearly define goals and priorities of older adults and aligning care to address them.
Patient Priorities Care (PPC) is intended to help ensure that health care for older adults is truly aligned with what matters most to them. It aims to improve health outcomes for patients everywhere based on what that means to each individual and providing health professionals with the tools to make that happen.
Over 10 years ago, it was developed by a national group of clinicians, older adults, caregivers, and health system leaders under the direction of individuals at Yale University School of Medicine, UTHealth Houston Institute on Aging, and Baylor College of Medicine.
PPC improves communication among patients, clinicians, and care partners by ensuring everyone is focused on the same outcomes, especially in the common situation of uncertainty, tradeoffs, or when there are multiple care choices and no best answer.
This approach has been shown to reduce perceived treatment burden, decrease unwanted care, such as medications being stopped, fewer self-management tasks added, and fewer diagnostic tests ordered, and increase wanted care.
The PPC website offers tools and resources for implementing PPC and published articles about PPC.
A critical part of PPC is identifying health priorities for older adults, which can be accomplished through the use of My Health Priorities, a free online self-assessment tool that guides older adults and care partners through steps to identify priorities. The steps included in the assessment are:
1. Identify what matters most
2. Identify a health goal
3. Identify bothersome symptoms or health problems
4. Clarify top priority to focus on
5. Identify burdensome medications and health related tasks
After completing the assessment, My Health Priorities provides a print-out to share and discuss with doctors, other health care professionals, and family, such as the example shown below.