Suite Talk: Age isn’t a specialty—it’s the future of healthcare
Blog | May 22, 2026
Reading time: 11 mins
If you’re riding Chicago’s Blue Line or traversing I-290 near the Illinois Medical District, there’s a sign that’s hard to miss. Perched atop Rush Tower in bold white letters, it poses a deceptively simple question: Who gets the chance to be healthy?
It’s actually less a question than a challenge—one that insists health is sacrosanct, not an ideal reserved for the fortunate. For patients, it’s an invitation to expect more. For Rush University System for Health, it’s a moral obligation to deliver.
Robyn Golden, associate vice president of social work and community health at Rush, helped shape those words as part of the system’s executive health equity team—work that reflects a career spent advocating for those too often left out of the conversation. As co-director of the Rush Center for Excellence in Aging, she and her team have helped drive efforts to redesign care for older adults by embedding age-friendly principles across the system, expanding support for caregivers, and pushing care beyond hospital walls into the community.
That mission has gained outsized importance as the 65+ patient population continues to grow. Already, older adults account for roughly half of hospital patients; by 2035, they are expected to drive the majority of utilization growth, including a 20% increase in inpatient discharges and a 27% rise in emergency department visits. As younger populations’ utilization remains relatively flat, the future of healthcare is increasingly defined by the needs of older adults—forcing health systems to rethink not just how care is delivered, but how it is coordinated, scaled, and sustained across the continuum.
Here, Golden and her colleague Molly Jenkins, program manager of the Center for Excellence in Aging, discuss the system’s trailblazing work in caring for older adults and five ways health systems can prepare for a future increasingly defined by aging populations.
During the Innovation Showcase at this year’s Vizient AMC CEO Network Meeting, Rush University System for Health President and CEO Dr. Omar Lateef described what inspired his institution’s approach to an age-friendly system of care.
When the Rush team first dug into the data, he said, the disparities were stark: a widely cited study showed people born on Chicago’s West Side lived nearly 20 years less than those born just miles away on Michigan Avenue. Older adults were also experiencing worse outcomes—even for treatable conditions.
The issue wasn’t a lack of expertise but rather fragmentation. Rush had strong programs across geriatrics, nursing, and social work, but they weren’t connected. The solution wasn’t to invent something new: it was to more widely integrate what already worked.
That meant building a system around the 4Ms framework, which entails simple interventions applied systematically:
- What Matters: asking patients—often for the first time—what they want from their care
- Medications: reducing harmful polypharmacy
- Mentation: preventing and managing delirium and assessing for and acting on dementia and depression.
- Mobility: keeping patients moving to avoid functional decline
The results were hard to ignore: shorter hospital stays, fewer readmissions and falls, and patient experience scores in the top 95th percentile. Notably, the improvements were greatest among the most vulnerable populations.
1. Move beyond specialization and embed aging care across the continuum
The needs of a 65-year-old patient managing one chronic condition look very different from those of an 85-year-old navigating multiple comorbidities, mobility challenges, and caregiver support. Treating aging as a niche specialty misses that nuance entirely.
For Rush, that prompted a shift away from siloed expertise toward something far more expansive: embedding age-friendly care across the system. Not as a program that sits off to the side, but as a set of principles that show up everywhere—from the emergency department to inpatient units to care in the home.
“We can no longer wait for people to specialize in aging,” Golden said. “Everyone is going to work with older adults.”
That philosophy extends across the entire care continuum. Unless clinicians are working exclusively with very young children, they will encounter older adults at some point, often in more ways than one. Even in pediatric settings, that can mean caring for grandparents raising young children or supporting multigenerational families navigating complex health needs. Aging, in other words, isn’t a specialty. It’s a constant—and one that your workforce must be ready for.
This is the sixth installment of our series that features perspectives from top leaders in healthcare, exploring expertise from across the continuum of care.
- Read the first installment, featuring John D. Couris, Florida Health Sciences Center CEO and president.
- Read the second, featuring Eric Tritch, chief supply chain officer and senior vice president at UChicago Medicine, and Richard Bagley, vice president of supply chain at UCHealth.
- Read the third, featuring Kathy Parrinello, president and CEO of Strong Memorial and Highland Hospitals in Rochester, N.Y., and Johnese Spisso, president of UCLA Health, CEO of the UCLA Hospital System and associate vice chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences.
- Read the fourth, featuring Jeff Butler, chief of operations, Community Clinical Network, UCLA Health.
- Read the fifth, featuring Dr. David Priest, chief safety and quality officer, Novant Health.
Learn about Vizient Member Networks—with 12 C-level networks that drive healthcare performance improvement that help accelerate hospital and healthcare leadership teams’ high-performance journeys.
2. Confront the workforce reality—and the biases that come with it
But readiness is far from guaranteed.
Designing a more integrated, age-friendly system is one thing. Ensuring the people inside it are prepared to deliver that care is another.
Even the most thoughtfully constructed models depend on a workforce that understands the needs of older adults—and right now, that’s a gap many health systems are still working to close. There simply aren’t enough clinicians entering the field to meet the growing demand, and for many, meaningful exposure to older adult care comes late, if at all.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, ‘I fell into the aging field and fell in love with it,’” Jenkins said.
At Rush, the focus has been on moving that learning upstream by ensuring clinicians across disciplines are equipped to care for older patients rather than relying on a small pool of specialists.
But capability alone isn’t enough. There’s also the question of bias—often subtle, sometimes unspoken, but deeply ingrained. Assumptions about what older adults can tolerate, how much they can improve, or what kind of care is “worth it” can quietly shape decisions before care even begins.
Changing that requires more than education. It requires a mindset shift—one that views older adults as individuals with goals, preferences, and the capacity to benefit from thoughtful, person-centered care.
That perspective is shaped in part by Golden and Jenkins’ backgrounds in social work, a discipline rooted in understanding the full context of a patient’s life, not just their diagnosis. As Jenkins noted, that means approaching care with curiosity, listening more closely, and translating across stakeholders to ensure care plans reflect what truly matters to patients and their families.
3. Secure C-suite buy-in by connecting aging care to system-wide priorities
Changing mindset at the frontlines is critical—but sustaining that change at scale requires leadership commitment. And for many organizations, aging initiatives can still feel like “the right thing to do,” rather than a strategic imperative.
Gaining that traction at Rush meant meeting leaders where they are. Early conversations focused on patient outcomes and experience, with the financial case coming into sharper focus over time. As age-friendly care became tied to quality metrics, throughput, and broader system performance, it became harder to ignore.
There also was a moment that reframed the conversation entirely.
“When we told leadership about age-friendly care, they said, ‘Well, that’s just good care—we should be doing that already, and for everyone,’” Golden recalled.
The shift from viewing aging care as additive to recognizing it as essential created a foundation for broader adoption. And it didn’t happen in isolation. External validation (from national organizations, emerging CMS measures, and growing industry attention) helped reinforce that this wasn’t just an internal priority, but part of a broader movement in how care is being defined.
Just as important, the work was backed by measurable results. Programs like the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP), which Rush has expanded across its inpatient units[MJ1.1] and emergency department, demonstrate how relatively simple, evidence-based interventions—focused on preventing delirium and maintaining function—can reduce length of stay, improve outcomes, and support more efficient care delivery. Such interventions are often low-cost and scalable, reinforcing that meaningful improvement doesn’t always require entirely new solutions.
- Integrating aging into training across disciplines—not just geriatrics
- Increasing exposure earlier in clinical education
- Challenging age-related bias in care delivery
- Building interdisciplinary teams that reflect real patient needs
4. Extend care beyond hospital walls and invest in community support
If there’s one theme that consistently arises in conversations about aging, it’s this: health doesn’t begin or end in the hospital. And yet, so much of the system is still designed as if it does.
For older adults especially, the factors that determine health outcomes—stable housing, access to food, caregiver support—often sit outside traditional clinical settings. Ignoring those realities makes it nearly impossible to deliver meaningful, sustained improvements in health.
“We know that so much of health and wellness happens inside the home and the community,” Jenkins said.
This raises a more uncomfortable truth: health systems are often discharging patients back into environments that make recovery difficult, if not impossible. Without addressing what’s happening outside their walls, even the best clinical care has limits.
At Rush, that understanding has translated into a more expansive view of care—one that extends beyond treatment to include the conditions that make that treatment effective. Whether it’s supporting caregivers, addressing social needs, or partnering with community-based organizations, the goal is the same: meet patients where they are, not just where the system is most comfortable operating.
Increasingly, that means thinking less in terms of individual programs and more in terms of an ecosystem—consisting of community-based organizations, home-based services, caregiver support networks, and public health and social services—that connects clinical care with the broader support systems older adults rely on every day.
For the 65+ population, the difference between stabilizing and truly improving often comes down to what happens after they leave the hospital.
5. Redefine quality by focusing on what matters to patients—and their caregivers
Ultimately, preparing for an aging population isn’t just about scaling services or redesigning workflows. It’s about reconsidering and redefining the concept of “good care.”
For too long, healthcare has measured success through clinical indicators alone: lab values, readmission rates, length of stay. Those metrics matter, but they don’t tell the whole story, particularly for older adults whose needs are often shaped as much by their daily environment as their diagnosis.
Just as importantly, they tend to overlook people who are critical to outcomes: caregivers, many of whom are already functioning as an extension of the healthcare system—just without the training, resources, or recognition.
“What people will say is, ‘As long as I’ve been coming to a medical center with the person I care for, no one has asked me about myself,’” Golden said.
For Rush, that insight has led to a more intentional effort to identify and support caregivers as part of the care team—not as an afterthought, but as a parallel population with their own needs, risks, and impact on patient outcomes. Through its Caring for Caregivers program, the health system works to systematically identify caregivers during clinical encounters, assess their capacity and needs, and connect them with resources and support. In some cases, that means integrating them directly into the care plan; in others, it means ensuring they have access to services that can sustain them in their role.
The shift is subtle but significant. Rather than assuming caregivers can absorb the demands of care, the model recognizes them as essential partners whose well-being directly influences everything from readmissions to recovery.
And in doing so, it expands the definition of quality itself. Not just whether a patient stabilizes or improves, but whether they, and the people supporting them, are able to live in a way that aligns with what matters most to them.
Because in the end, the question posed on the side of Rush Tower isn’t theoretical. Who gets the chance to be healthy depends, in large part, on whether health systems are willing to rethink not just how they deliver care—but who they design it for.
Through its Center for Excellence in Aging, Rush University System for Health focuses on reducing health issues tied to social, economic, and structural factors, while expanding access to care, behavioral health services, and chronic disease prevention.
That work shows up in both visible and behind-the-scenes ways. Rush partners with senior housing, nursing homes, and community organizations to deliver education on dementia and healthy aging. It trains clinicians and community providers to better support older adults. And through initiatives like Rush Generations, it offers free programs, workshops, and support services that help older adults and their caregivers navigate aging with more confidence and connection.