Interview with a quality leader: Dr. Eric Coleman, on care for geriatric populations. Interview by Kathleen Tornow...

Dr. Coleman serves as the founding Director of The Care Transitions Program, a national program with a mission to improve quality and safety at times of transitions or care "hand-offs" across settings for persons with complex care needs. This program recognizes that a multifaceted strategy is needed and has taken action to address the problem from multiple angles, including supporting patients and their family caregivers, articulating the key roles and competencies for practitioners, developing and testing quality performance measures, creating new tools to identify medical errors, promoting the role of health information technology, and working directly with policy makers. To date, over 400 leading healthcare organizations have adopted the Care Transitions Intervention. The National Quality Forum endorsed and subsequently re-endorsed the Care Transitions Measure for use in performance measurement and public reporting and over 3,500 organizations in 15 countries have requested permission for its use. To meet this demand, the Care Transitions Measure is available in seven languages. Dr. Coleman is currently a Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver. He is currently the Primary Investigator for seven active grants.