Boult Receives Geriatric Leadership Award (web article)

Charles E. Boult, MD, MPH, MBA, has been named the recipient of the 2008 UCLA David H. Solomon Award. This award is given annually to recognize an influential leader in the field of geriatrics. Dr. Boult presented the David H. Solomon Award Lecture, entitled “The Future of Health Care for Older Americans,” at the 25th annual UCLA Intensive Course in Geriatric Medicine and Board Review course on September 17, 2008, in Marina del Rey, California. The award is named in honor of David H. Solomon, MD, former chair of medicine and professor emeritus at UCLA. The annual award recognizes influential leaders in the field of geriatrics.

Boult is the director of the Roger C. Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  He is also a professor of public health with joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins University Schools of Medicine and Nursing.  Dr. Boult is a geriatrician who has focused his entire career on development and testing of novel approaches to organizing, financing, and delivering health care to older populations. 

“Chad Boult is one of the nation’s leaders in developing new models of health care to improve the health of older persons,” said David Reuben, MD, director of the UCLA Multicampus Program in Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology.  “The care models he has developed have reinvented traditional healthcare to ensure that we can better meet the wide range of health care needs of older adults.”

Boult’s current research includes Guided Care, a novel, multidisciplinary model of primary care for people with multiple chronic conditions.  Guided Care is designed to improve the quality and outcomes of complex health care by improving the delivery system’s design, decision support, access to clinical information, and support for self-management, and by facilitating patients’ access to community services. Boult is the principal investigator of a multisite, randomized controlled trial of Guided Care involving 49 physicians, 904 older patients, and 319 family members in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area.  The study is funded by a public-private partnership of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institute on Aging, the John A. Hartford Foundation, and the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation.  Six months of data show that Guided Care improves the quality of care, reduces health care costs and improves job satisfaction. For more information, go to www.guidedcare.org.

Boult and his team recently received an additional $1.7 million grant from the John A. Hartford Foundation to help hundreds of primary care practices improve the quality and outcomes of health care for older adults with chronic illnesses.  The grant funding will help medical practices in eight states—to be selected by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)—to qualify for and participate in CMS’s three-year Medicare Medical Home Demonstration project. Beginning in January 2010, practices participating in the demonstration will provide a set of comprehensive, coordinated “medical home” services to Medicare beneficiaries living with chronic medical conditions. Under the direction of Boult, the Lipitz Center will offer health care providers information, education and technical support based on the Hopkins-developed Guided Care model.

Contact for Guided Care: Tracy Novak at 410-614-1932 ortnovak@jhsph.edu.