Offering graduate medical education funding to nursing homes could help ready physicians for aging p

Medical policy experts are debating ways to help prepare physicians to treat the rapidly growing population of elderly Americans. Extending Medicare graduate education funding to nursing homes could be one way, according to a recent article.

Policy experts have proposed a series of policy changes in a recent article that appears in the May issue of the journal Health Affairs. Authors offer the idea of extending Medicare graduate medical education funding to nursing homes and other non-hospital settings. State policies could change to require geriatric continuing education credits for physicians to maintain their licensure, or to require that physicians practice as Medicaid providers or medical directors of nursing homes, the authors propose. Medicare already provides teaching hospitals with large annual subsidies for graduate medical education.

The report’s authors come from a variety of universities and institutes, including the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Regenstrief Institute, the Urban Institute, and the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.