Project Summary
The proposed project will focus on the complex problems that the growing population of people over the age of 50 living with HIV face related to aging, co-occurring conditions, complex care coordination, and poly-pharmacy. Their needs are particularly pressing in a semirural geographic region like the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State, where dispersed providers and patients challenge the effective coordination of care.
Hudson River HealthCare (HRHCare), a not-for-profit federally qualified health center with locations throughout the Hudson Valley, identified aging with HIV as an underserved priority area and proposed to collaborate with the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute (AI) to bring together stakeholders from community-based organizations, healthcare providers, aging- and co-morbidity–focused organizations, and patients to create a research-oriented stakeholder group. AI’s successes using patient-driven, community-based collaborative approaches across New York State will be a useful resource for HRHCare to foster a productive team-based approach to eventually develop robust and meaningful comparative effectiveness research on the optimal model of care for this growing population.
Two stakeholder meetings will be held in the initial nine-month Tier I period to discuss key objectives and the group's governing process, identify additional stakeholders who should be included in a newly formed research team (patients, providers, other researchers), and appoint an operational workgroup that meets regularly to ensure the project’s progression between the stakeholder meetings. The workgroup will participate in monthly teleconferences and a web-based portal to share and develop ideas. The larger group will reconvene to outline a Tier II phase toward research development.