Published Work by AGEM Members

AGEM Author Spotlight: Gwen Costa Jacobsohn, PhD, MA Geriatric Research Program Coordinator, BerbeeWalsh Department of Emergency Medicine, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

Effectiveness of a care transitions intervention for older adults discharged home from the emergency department: A randomized controlled trial

Jacobsohn GC, Jones CMC, Green RK, Cochran AL, Caprio TV, Cushman JT, Kind AJH, Lohmeier M, Mi R, Shah MN (2020). Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine https://doi.org/10.1111/acem.14357 

Article Summary:  This is an article reporting a randomized control trial at 3 urban academic emergency departments to determine if improving care transitions following ED visits may reduce post-ED adverse events among older adults. The Care Transitions Intervention (CTI) has shown improvement in hospital-to-home transitions. 1,756 older adults were randomized to usual care in the ED versus a minimally modified CTI which consists of a home visit 24 -72 hours post discharge and one to three phone calls over 28 days. Compared with usual care participants, the intervention patients did not have a reduced 30-day ED revisit but did significantly increase key care transition behaviors (outpatient follow-up, red flag knowledge). 

Why Geriatric Emergency Medicine?

I have an unusual background for an EM researcher. In my early professional days, I was knowledge worker for a big management consulting firm, facilitating intensive workshops on strategic planning and organizational change. That experience led me to go back to graduate school to better understand group decision making, information sharing, and creative collaborations. Life events eventually steered me towards studying health communication in both organizational and interpersonal contexts. My early research focused on the provision of family-centered care, particularly communication between parents and pediatric clinicians. After working as a researcher in the UW-Madison Dept. of Pediatrics and a post-doc Research Fellow in the Dept. of Family Medicine & Community Health, I made the move to Geriatric Emergency Medicine. Surprisingly, I was able to apply a lot of what I had learned studying adolescents and parents in primary and tertiary care to my work with older adults and caregivers in emergency care. Utilizing my experience in stakeholder-engaged mixed methods research, I have had the pleasure to help design, implement, and/or evaluate care transitions interventions for older adults following ED visits, community paramedic-delivered programs to support caregivers of persons living with dementia, and automated EHR-based clinical decision support tools to help ED clinicians identify patients at highest risk of falls and refer them to outpatient fall prevention services. My expertise in provider-patient-caregiver communication, as well as patient-centered outcomes research, has greatly informed not only on how we deliver these interventions, but also how we engage stakeholders and interdisciplinary teams to collaboratively develop these programs from the onset. I plan to continue along this D&I research trajectory within our Aging Research Group, particularly towards improving care for patients living with dementia and their caregivers. I think there is a lot of value to be gained by including social scientists in geriatric emergency medicine research, and encourage other departments to think about how adding non-clinical researchers to your team could help boost the quality and impact of the work you produce.

Bio:  Gwen Costa Jacobsohn is a Scientist with the Aging Research Group and Research Services Core in the UW-Madison BerbeeWalsh Dept. of Emergency Medicine. She holds a PhD in Health Communication and a Masters’ in Organizational/Small Group Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was also a Primary Care Research Fellow in the UW-Madison Dept. of Family Medicine & Community Health and an AHEAD Scholar (Advancing Health Equity and Diversity) at the UW Collaborative Center for Health Equity. She has conducted mixed-methods studies in specialty, primary, and acute care environments, involving patients, family caregivers, healthcare providers, clinic administrators, and community members. Since moving to Emergency Medicine, her focus has been on the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions to improve care for older adult patients and their caregivers both during and following ED visits.

Twitter Handle @GHCJ_PhD

February 2020

GAPcare: The Geriatric Acute and Post-Acute Fall Prevention Intervention in the Emergency Department: Preliminary Data.
Goldberg EM, Marks SJ, Ilegbusi A, Resnik L, Strauss DH, Merchant RC.
J Am Geriatr Soc. 2020 Jan;68(1):198-206. doi: 10.1111/jgs.16210. Epub 2019 Oct 17.
PMID: 31621901

January 2020

Concepts in Practice: Geriatric Emergency Departments.

Southerland LT, Lo AX, Biese K, Arendts G, Banerjee J, Hwang U, Dresden S, Argento V, Kennedy M, Shenvi CL, Carpenter CR. Ann Emerg Med. 2020 Feb;75(2):162-170.

November 2019

Association of Emergency Clinicians' Assessment of Mortality Risk With Actual 1-Month Mortality Among Older Adults Admitted to the Hospital. 
Ouchi, K. et. al. (2019) JAMA Network Open.

August 2019

Managing the Elderly Emergency Department Patient
Shenvi, C. L., & Platts-Mills, T. F. (2019) Annals of Emergency Medicine.

February 2019

Exploring Older Adult ED Fall Patients' Understanding of Their Fall: A Qualitative Study.
Shankar KN, Taylor D, Rizzo CT, Liu SW. Geriatric Orthopaedic Surgery & Rehabilitation. 2017 Dec;8(4):231-237

November 2018
Common Medication Management Approaches for Older Adults in the Emergency Department.
Dresden SM, Allen K, Lyden AE. Clinics in Geriatric Medicine. 2018 Aug;34(3):415-433

April 2018
Telephone Follow‐Up for Older Adults Discharged to Home from the Emergency Department: A Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Trial
Biese KJ, Busby-Whitehead J, Cai J, Stearns SC, Roberts E, Mihas P, Emmet D, Zhou Q, Farmer F, Kizer JS.Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 2018 March; 66(3): 452-458

March 2018
An Emergency Department Observation Unit Is a Feasible Setting for Multidisciplinary Geriatric Assessments in Compliance With the Geriatric Emergency Department Guidelines
Southerland LT, Vargas AJ, Nagaraj L, Gure TR, Caterino JM. Academic Emergency Medicine. 2018 Jan; 25(1): 76-82

February 2018
Geriatric Emergency Department Innovations: Transitional Care Nurses and Hospital Use
Hwang U, Dresden SM, Rosenberg MS, Garrido MM, Loo G, Sze J, Gravenor S, Courtney DM, Kang R, Zhu CW, Vargas-Torres C, Grudzen CR, Richardson LD; GEDI WISE Investigators

January 2018

Major trauma in the older patient: Evolving trauma care beyond management of bumps and bruises
Carpenter CR, Arendts G, Hullick C , Nagaraj, Cooper Z, Burkett E

December 2017

Emergency Department Pain Management Following Implementation of a Geriatric Hip Fracture Program
Casey SD, Stevenson DE,  Mumma BE, Slee C, Wolinsky PR, Hirsch CH,Tyler K

November 2017

Emergency Medical Services Perspectives on Identifying and Reporting Victims of Elder Abuse
Rosen T; Lien C, Stern ME, Bloemen EM, Mysliwiec R, McCarthy TJ, Clark S, Mulcare MR, Ribaudo DS, Lachs MS, Pillemer K, Flomenbaum NE

October 2017

Discrepancies between information provided and information required by emergency physicians for long-term care patients
Evans CS; Timothy Platts-Mills, MD, MSc; Fernandez AR; Grover JM; Cabanas JG; Patel MD; Vilke GM; Brice JH

September 2017

Discrepancies between information provided and information required by emergency physicians for long-term care patients
Parshar R, McLeod S,Don Melady, MSc, MD, 

August 2017

The Effect of Older Age on EMS Use for Transportation to an Emergency Department
Manish N. Shah, MD, MPH; Jones CMC; Wasserman EB, Li T, Amidon A, Abbot, M

July 2017

Serious conditions for ED elderly fall patients: a secondary analysis of the Basel Non-Specific Complaints study
Shan W. Liu MD, SD; Jiraporn Sri-On MD, Gregory Philip Tirrell MS, Christian Nickel MD, Roland Bingisser MD

June 2017

Accuracy of Current Diagnostic Criteria for Acute Bacterial Infection in Older Adults in the Emergency Department
Jeffrey Caterino, MD; Robert Leininger, MD; David M. Kline, PhD; Lauren T. Southerland, MD; Salman Khaliqdina, MBBS; Christopher W. Baugh, MD, MBA; Daniel J. Pallin, MD, MPH; Kurt B. Stevenson, MD, MPH

May 2017

Factors Associated with Hospital Admission for Older Adults Receiving Care in U.S. Emergency Departments
Alexander X. Lo, MD, PhD; Kellie L. Flood, MD; Kevin Biese, MD, MAT; Timothy F. Platts-Mills, MD, MSc; John P. Donnelly, MSPH; Christoper R. Carpenter, MD, MS

April 2017

Emergency Department Visits Without Hospitalization Are Associated With Functional Decline in Older Persons
Justine M. Nagurney, MD; William Fleischman, MD, MHS; Ling Han, MD, PhD; Linda Leo-Summers, MPH, Heather G. Allore, PhD; Thomas M. Gill, MD

Improving Pain Relief in Elder Patients (I-PREP): An Emergency Department Education and Quality Intervention
Teresita M. Hogan, MD; Michael D. Howell, MD; John F. Cursio, PhD; Alexandra Wong, BA; William Dale, MD 

March 2017

Exploring Delirium's Heterogeneity: Association Between Arousal Subtypes at Initial Presentation and 6-Month Mortality in Older Emergency Department Patients
Jin H. Han, MD, MSc; Nathan E. Brummel, MD, MSCI; Rameela Chandrasekhar, PhD; Jo Ellen Wilson, MD; Xulei Liu, MS; Eduard E. Vasilevskis, MD, MPH; Timothy D. Girard, MD, MSCI; Maria E. Carlo, MD; Robert S. Dittus, MD, MPH; John F. Schnelle, PhD; E. Wesley Ely, MD, MPH

December 2016

Feasibility of nurses measuring gait speed in older community-dwelling Emergency Department patients
Paula W. Tucker, DNP, FNP-BC; Dian Dowling Evans, PhD, FNP-BC, ENP-BC, FAANP; Carolyn K. Clevenger, DNP, RN, GNP-BC, AGPCNP-BC, FAANP; Michelle Ardisson, DNP, RN, ACNP-BC; Ula Hwang, MD, MPH, FACEP 

October 2013

Geriatric Department Guidelines
Mark S. Rosenberg, DO, MBA, FACEP, Christopher R. Carpenter, MD, MSc, FACEP, Marilyn Bromley, RN, BS, Jeffrey M. Caterino, MD, MPH, FACEP, Audrey Chun, MD, Lowell Gerson, PhD, Jason Greenspan, MD, FACEP, Ula Hwang, MD, FACEP, David P. John, MD, FACEP, Joelle Lichtman, MA, William L. Lyons, MD, Betty Mortensen, RN, MS, BSN, FACHE, Timothy F. Platts-Mills, MD, MSc, Luna C. Ragsdale, MD, MPH, FACEP, Julie Rispoli, David C. Seaberg, MD, CPE, FACEP, Scott T. Wilber, MD, MPH, FACEP