Geriatrics and Extended care-focused Network to Enhance Research Across The Enterprise (GENERATE) focuses on enabling Veterans and care partners to have greater access to high quality home and long-term services to meet their needs as they age. About 80% of Veterans will need some type of long-term service or support in their lifetime. Historically, most of this care has been provided by informal caregivers, though a significant number of Veterans receive care in nursing homes or other facility-based settings. Supporting these aging Veterans and their care partners with the highest-quality care requires significant and continuous innovation, assessment, and adaptability. GENERATE builds an infrastructure for looking at what data and research exist, prioritizing that, and communicating findings to help drive research, policy, and care changes. GENERATE serves a central role to create bridges across traditionally siloed areas of research, policy, and VA operations and help increase the real-world impact of VA research by developing products that can be used immediately to benefit Veterans and their care partners.
GENERATE has three priority areas in which it will support advancement:
GENERATE is grounded in a learning health system conceptual framework and has the following three goals.
Goal 1: Data Infrastructure. Support integration of caregiving, long-term care, and aging data by characterizing relevant data, measures, and sources; determining needs; and identifying priority areas to improve future research and policy.
Goal 2: Evidence Curation. Characterize and curate current evidence from existing work related to caregiving, long-term care, and aging to identify research opportunities/gaps, engage marginalized groups, and support information exchange to move research findings into practice.
Goal 3: Veteran Impact. Rapidly move caregiving, long-term care, and aging research into policy and practice through mentorship, response to ORD and legislative needs, and pilot grants.
GENERATE is responsive to the VA national priority of greater choice for Veterans and addresses an ORD-wide priority to increase the real-world significance of VA research by developing products partners can immediately disseminate to the field. The impact of GENERATE’s activities will be to enable Veterans and families to have greater access to high quality home and long-term services to meet their needs as they age
Goal 1 activities will help understand current availability and use of data to drive better care for older Veterans and their caregivers, identify data and measurement gaps and opportunities for collaboration and further research, support operational partners’ data needs, and increase communication across shareholders to support enterprise-wide use.
Goal 2 will help understand the landscape of current research on caregiving, long-term care, and aging to identify and support opportunities for research to move the needle forward. We will create structures and processes for information exchange to help move findings into practice. We will also engage traditionally marginalized groups, so nothing about them is done without them.
Goal 3 activities will develop a mentorship program to connect senior and early career researchers. We will also create a rapid response team to help our partners respond to legislative and other requests. And we will actively solicit funds to support a potential pilot program to enable research to rapidly address known needs.
GENERATE forges unprecedented collaboration in caregiving/long-term care/aging, spanning across traditional research and operations silos to jointly move the needle forward on improving Veteran impacts. It uses a community-engaged approach to support novel and meaningful participation of marginalized populations whose perspectives are central to the caregiving, long-term care, and aging fields.
