Bringing Age-Friendly Care to Rural Communities: The MobileMOC Interprofessional Mobile Health Model

Rural older adults face disproportionate barriers to health care access, including provider shortages, transportation challenges, chronic disease burden, and fragmented systems of care. The authors describe early implementation of MobileMOC (medical outreach clinic), an interprofessional mobile health care model developed by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to serve rural older adults across nine rural southeast Tennessee counties and Hamilton County, focusing on the 4Ms (What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility). MobileMOC distributes responsibility for the 4Ms across three integrated pillars: a mobile clinic, senior center activities, and interprofessional education. The authors report operational data from January through June 2026, the period following standardization of program documentation. Across 70 clinic days and 234.5 clinic hours, MobileMOC recorded 182 patient encounters among 129 unique patients, 58 (45.0%) of whom were 65 years of age or older. The program delivered 1579 screening encounters across clinic and senior center venues, generating 119 referrals to interprofessional disciplines and community organizations, and supported 710 student clinical training hours. MobileMOC illustrates the feasibility of operationalizing the 4Ms framework through an interprofessional mobile model embedded in trusted community settings, while highlighting the site-level variability, measurement limitations, and financing gaps that shape early implementation.