Rachel Jantea wins Geriatrics Academic Career Award

The Health Resources & Services Administration has awarded Rachel Jantea, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, with the Geriatrics Academic Career Award.

The award comes with a four-year, $87,000 per year grant to fund Jantea's project, titled "Leveraging resources and expertise to build Age-Friendly Health Systems to improve delirium and dementia care." The GAC Award will allow Jantea to develop the necessary knowledge and skills to lead health care transformation in a variety of settings, such as rural and/or medically underserved settings, and provide training in clinical geriatrics, including the training of interprofessional teams of health care professionals to provide health care for older adults.

Acquiring that skill set will then allow Jantea to apply that knowledge to begin the transformation of clinical learning environments into Age-Friendly Health Systems by training interprofessional teams in 4Ms-based (what matters, medication, mentation, and mobility) geriatrics while concentrating on delirium and dementia care in acute settings.

These changes will address a priority area for the HRSA in increasing telehealth access and age-friendly care to medically underserved areas, nursing homes, and online learning platforms.

“Receiving this award has been a goal of mine for nearly 10 years,” Jantea said. “As a geriatrics clinician educator focused on interprofessional education and practice, this award gives me the support to train health care providers to provide the highest quality of care for Houston’s older adults, while developing as a national leader in the field of geriatric interprofessional education and practice. I feel very blessed to have the support of my mentors, my department, and UTHealth Houston in this endeavor.”

Jantea received her medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in 2013 before completing an internal medicine residency (2016), geriatric medicine fellowship (2017), and a postdoctoral fellowship (2019) from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Jantea also completed a masters in medical education at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in 2019.

Jantea joined the McGovern Medical School faculty as an assistant professor in 2019 and also serves as the director of education for the UTHealth Houston Institute on Aging and as the McGovern Medical School faculty director for the Texas Joint Admissions Medical Program.