Geriatricians Leading Innovation: Collaborating to Enhance Care as We Age

In the early 20th century, Geriatric Medicine emerged as a specialty with a focus on improving the health and quality of life of older adults. Almost since inception, geriatricians have worked in collaboration with other medical specialties and health professionals to achieve this goal. This focus on collaboration has led to innovations that are improving care for older adults across settings of care, some of which are being led by other specialties (e.g., the Geriatric Surgery Verification Program). In 2015, Geriatric Medicine began to recruit fellows through the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), and data from the past 10 years (2015-2024) reflect stable recruitment into the field with approximately 300 fellows entering geriatrics fellowship annually. The field has been innovative in its efforts to create training pathways that support physicians to complete geriatrics fellowship, including national pilots that combine geriatrics and palliative care training and offer clinical geriatrics experiences during internal and family medicine residency training underway at the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. In research, the field has contributed to extending our collective healthspan, championed inclusion of older adults in all research, and led efforts to develop investigators who are focused on the geriatrics aspects of their research. Opportunities for geriatricians to build on the foundations they have laid include leading Age-Friendly Health Systems and artificial intelligence into healthcare implementation with a continued focus on partnering with others to achieve meaningful change in the health and well-being of others.