Observational StudyThe LEARNING WISDOM Phase II Scale up Project

An executive committee will oversee the entire project. This committee, led by the nominated PI and Director of Nursing, will meet every 4 weeks during this four-year project. The team may include, depending on the hospital site: an administrator, the ED Director, the ED Head nurse, a community and/or hospital-based geriatric nurse specialist, an ED physician, a hospitalist, a geriatrician, a family physician, a home care nurse/coordinator, an inpatient unit manager, the research coordinator, and a local patient/caregiver. Each local team will be responsible for selecting and implementing the ACE intervention(s) best suiting their milieu, and will include locally identified champions to lead the local implementation.

The investigators will implement the context-adapted ACE program with the support of administrators and local implementation teams who will have the responsibility to roll out the different elements of the intervention within their respective hospitals. It may include a series of systematic pre-discharge, post-discharge and across transitions period interventions for eligible patients: 1) a GEM nurse to support patients during the post-discharge transition period, 2) pre- and post-hospitalization medication list reconciliation, 3) systematic discharge summaries given to patients and/or caregiver, and sent to their family physician, 4) a planned follow-up appointment with their family physician, 5) a systematic follow-up phone call, 6) access to wiki-based patient-oriented KT tools, 7) access to a community-based telemonitoring service.

Results from each center will be analysed over time. Guided by previous work in healthcare governance, the investigators will analyze the impact of the sequential interventions within the context of a major health reform in Quebec aiming at implementing an integrated health system and within the PI program's overall goal of creating a Learning Health System. This will be accomplished by conducting a comparative case study across the four study sites to compare the barriers, facilitators and local solutions implemented to gain a better understanding about how the ACE program could eventually be scaled up elsewhere.

hospital-based geriatric emergency nurse (GEM nurse) specialist to support patients during the post-discharge transition period

pre- and post-hospitalization medication list reconciliation for elderly

systematic discharge summaries given to patients and/or caregiver, and sent to their family physician

a planned follow-up appointment with their family physician

a systematic follow-up phone call for discharged patients

access to wiki-based patient-oriented KT tools

access to a community-based telemonitoring service