With approximately 26 million boomers entering Medicare by 2030, the movement to empower our Older Americans in Aging is now more important than ever. Speaking recently in the New York Times on the article 'Biden Would End His Second Term at 86. What Could That Mean for His Brain and Body?', Susan has spent her career trying to break the barriers of ageism in health care. We interviewed Susan to learn her views on how our marginalized populations are treated, how to be age-friendly, and what an age-friendly health care system looks like.

Susan Wehry is the director of AgingME, a federally funded Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Project based at the University of New England in Maine . A geriatric psychiatrist by training, she is former commissioner of the Vermont Department of Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living, and current Wehry also serves as an associate clinical professor in the College of Osteopathic Medicine at UNE and is a nationally recognized thought leader, keynote speaker and workshop facilitator on topics encompassing social isolation, depression, dementia, COVID-19 and healthy aging.

From value-based health care initiatives to quality metrics, primary care physicians are being asked to do increasingly more to ensure the overall health and well-being of their patients, while also reducing the burden on the health care system as a whole.

One example is the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid’s recent Chronic Care Management (CCM) initiative, which expands the reimbursement opportunities for physicians who provide virtual care to their sickest patients in between doctor visits. But these opportunities can feel out of reach for small, private practices running on already limited margins

With ever-increasing demands on physicians to deliver both quantity and quality, supporting the whole health of a patient can be a challenge. Senscio's Medical Director and practicing physician Karthik Ravindran, MD. shared his insight into the challenges faced by primary care physicians today and why he is a firm believer in virtual care.

“Managing complex patients — the ones who have numerous medical conditions, comorbidities, medications, hospitalizations — in a 5- to 10-minute [patient] visit, you can do it, but you do a really crappy job. There’s not a human way to possibly do it well. That breeds a certain level of helplessness in the provider. We’re sort of trained to be — and it’s not a correct ethos — but you are the one who is going to save the world and fix it, but you just can’t with the bureaucracy of the way health care is structured. It’s just not possible, and it’s not realistic either. People live 99 percent of their life at home and they spend 5 minutes in my office. That’s not their life. So what is nice about Senscio is the fact that it reaches into that 99.9 percent......