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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2885
igaa057.2885
Abstracts
Session 7215 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Spreading Telehealth for Older Adults in Rural Areas Through Network of Geriatric Interprofessional Teams
Barczi Steven 1 Gately Megan 2 Welch Lauren 3 Nearing Kathryn 4 Thielke Stephen 5 Pimentel Camilla 6 Previll Laura 7 Dryden Eileen 8 1 
University of Wisconsin, Madison; William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital, Madison, Wisconsin, United States
2 
Bedford VA Medical Center, Bedford, Massachusetts, United States
3 
William S Middleton VAMC GRECC, Madison, Wisconsin, United States
4 
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, Colorado, United States
5 
VA Puget Sound Health Care System, Seattle, Washington, United States
6 
Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital, Center for Heallthcare Organization and Implementation research, Bedford, Massachusetts, United States
7 
Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina, United States
8 
Center for Health Care Implementation Research (CHOIR), Bedford, Maryland, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”796 796
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Older adults living in rural areas have limited access to geriatrics interprofessional team care. In the Veteran healthcare system, geriatric teams such as geriatricians, nursing professionals, social workers, pharmacists and psychologists, located in urban areas link up with rural clinics to provide geriatric consultation remotely through clinical video telehealth and other means in the project GRECC Connect. Since its inception in 2014, the service has now grown to 16 geriatric teams offering consultation to over 100 clinic sites serving older rural Veterans. GRECC Connect delivered over 2,000 consultations in 2019, meeting complex care needs by identifying and linking geriatric services and management to patients with geriatric syndromes. The network of established geriatric teams, local champions and a shared Electronic Health Record facilitated the spread, while ongoing effort to build and maintain relationships between consultants and local rural provider teams and other community based services are important for ongoing success.