About Us

Goals

The Institute on Aging goals are aligned with the three UTHealth Houston missions: educate health science professionals; discover and translate advances in the biomedical,behavioral, and population health sciences; and model the best practices in clinical care and public health. These measures of our future successes are:

• Accelerate age-friendly innovations and interprofessional training as the lead institution for a U01 funded Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program.
• National dissemination of data and tools for embedding a frailty index and assessment tools in EHR (with UT Physicians as the case example).
• Promote elder justice by establishing a nationally recognized center for Elder Mistreatment education, prevention, intervention, and training.
• Become the national hub for dissemination of the Patient Priorities Care approach to multimorbidity care of older adults (with Center for Healthy Aging as the case example).
• Achieve top national rankings for geriatrics and gerontology training and research for UTHealth Houston programs.

The Institute Cores

• Administrative Core: The Administrative Core will oversee all administrative and budget management of the Institute under the overall direction of the Executive Director and the Internal Steering Committee.
• Clinical Research and Innovations Core: The Clinical Research and Innovations Core will develop and support innovative research and healthcare improvement focused on the concept areas outlined in the five-year plan.
• Geroscience Core: The core will develop a geroscience strategic plan, including efforts to target grant opportunities, development of training programs and strategic recruitments, environment to promote career development and an annual research symposium.
• Education and Training Core: The core will identify and support activities occurring within UTHealth Houston with a focus on health professionals' training and community-facing education.
• Community Outreach and Engagement Core The core will develop a community-engagement strategic plan, maintain an external website and newsletter, and conduct community facing activities, symposia, and collaborations.
• Clinical Informatics and Decision Support Core: The core will implement and sustain clinical innovations relying on informatics and decision support tools and patient-facing applications.
• Texas Elder Abuse and Mistreatment (TEAM) program: TEAM promotes elder justice by establishing a nationally recognized center for Elder Mistreatment education, prevention, intervention, and training.
• Population Health Research Core: The core will develop research infrastructure for conducting and disseminating population health discoveries, interventions, and community health practices.

Specific Aims: Defining a New Aging Paradigm

Geriatrics is about the whole person, including their social setting. Clinicians synthesize vast amounts of data from multiple sources to understand the whole person and meet their unique needs. We envision integration of advanced informatics and machine learning of available data with innovative technological and clinician assessments that generate novel data and meaningful assessments of vulnerabilities among older adults The Institute on Aging will foster interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaborations to integrate expertise in clinical geriatrics with clinical and health services interventions to improve function and health outcomes.

History