My passion for geriatric medicine and improving our healthcare system’s response to the geriatric patient comes from my deep-rooted life experiences. As the youngest child of already aging parents, I appreciated the need for high-quality geriatric care at an early age. Although I attended high school in the United States, I grew up in Serbia, where I also attended medical school. In Serbia, I experienced firsthand the effects a brutal, largely rural and undeveloped healthcare system can have on the most vulnerable. After completing medical school, my love for geriatric medicine and my deeply-felt need to advocate for this patient population drew me out of my home country and brought me to the United States for training in internal medicine at a Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence, Rhode Island(RI). I continued my learning journey to Duke University and the Durham VAMC where I completed an advanced geriatric fellowship and obtained my masters in health sciences. During my years of training, I have learned that my passion resides with the development and promotion of geriatric education as a cornerstone for the overall advancement of our field. At Duke, I became involved in a number of efforts focused on elder abuse, especially of the veteran population. Through this work I was able to better appreciate the complexities of our current healthcare systems and how detrimental they can be to the older adult. This inspired my work in transitions of care, publishing on transitions of care in RI and working with colleagues on AGS’s educational series, AGS CoCare: Ortho, transitions of care piece. After joining Brown University as a junior faculty member, I was able to continue promoting geriatric medicine and interprofessional geriatric learning by taking an active role in the geriatric fellowship, teaching learners of all levels including medical students, internal medicine residents, geriatric fellows and geriatric psychiatry fellows, and as serving as medical director to a local hospice agency. Most recently, the underutilization of alternative models of care such as home based, palliative and hospice and the overutilization of acute level of care, such as the emergency room, has led me to think about needed change working towards an age-friendly healthcare system and to my work with Integra, Rhode Island’s largest accountable care organization. Being part of Integra has been eye-opening and I realize that my enthusiasm for geriatric medicine and education development can be combined to bring new voices and views to advocacy and improved care for older adults.
