Specialty Society Grant Program 

Request for Applications Due December 3, 2025

The Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS), with support from The John A. Hartford Foundation, is  providing an opportunity for specialty societies to incorporate evidence-based age-friendly care into specialty ambulatory care for older adults. CMSS will provide grant awards to selected specialty societies to improve the quality of care of older adults through the integration of the evidence-based Age-Friendly Health Systems 4Ms Framework (What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility) in ambulatory specialty care settings. 

Background 

Given the shift from hospitals to ambulatory care for older adults, there is an increasingly compelling need to incorporate evidence-based, age-friendly practices into ambulatory care. While ambulatory care may often be preferable to hospital-based care, older patients and their caregivers now encounter complex ambulatory care that is not well coordinated across specialties and settings of care, especially for those with multiple chronic conditions and functional limitations, including dementia. This shift to the ambulatory care space for older adults creates an urgent need to spread evidence-based strategies into specialty practice. The Age-Friendly Health Systems movement, an initiative of The John A. Hartford Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), in partnership with the American Hospital Association and Catholic Health Association of the United States, has developed an evidence-based set of clinical practices represented in the 4Ms Framework that improves care of older adults across settings of care, including in ambulatory care. IHI has developed extensive resources to support the adoption of the 4Ms across various care settings, including ambulatory care, and has established a recognition program to incentivize its adoption. However, further reach into ambulatory care—and reliable practice of the 4Ms in specialty practices—requires the specialties to define how the 4Ms will be practiced with their patient population and integrated into their workflows. It also requires alignment with the incentives of that specialty. The Age-Friendly Health Systems 4Ms Framework is designed to allow and even encourage this contextualization for reliable practice of the 4Ms. Adopting the 4Ms in ambulatory specialty care  settings will ensure that evidence-based, age-friendly care is provided to older adults, particularly those with multiple chronic conditions and functional limitations.

Program Scope

The Age-Friendly Implementation Awards will be granted to at least five societies to support the development, dissemination, implementation, and evaluation of evidence-based Age-Friendly 4Ms care in their specialty. AACE will work with up to ten practices to identify the levels that will increase adoption of the 4Ms and support reliable practice of the 4Ms. These learnings about how the 4Ms are practiced in their specialty and how to facilitate their adoption will be captured in targeted resources, including a Specialty-Specific Implementation Guide with sample workflows and guidance for integrating the 4Ms into EHRs. All sites will be required to disseminate the final data and results that may be incorporated into final outcomes papers and reports from the program. The final Specialty-Specific Implementation Guides will also be shared with IHI to support implementation more broadly through the Age-Friendly Health Systems movement. To achieve the project goal of supporting the adoption of the 4Ms in ambulatory specialty practices, project objectives for the societies include: 

• Objective 1: Develop a Specialty-Specific Implementation Guide 
• Objective 2: Work with selected practices to drive adoption of routine collection of the 4Ms into practice.
• Objective 3: Evaluate the implementation, adoption and impact of specialty specific 4Ms approaches across participating practices through the collection and analysis of 4Ms adherence data and specialty specific metrics.
• Objective 4: Disseminate specialty-specific age-friendly care resources broadly within your specialty to  drive specialty adoption of age-friendly practices. 

Timeframe:

• Application due: December 3, 2025
• Decisions made: February 6, 2026
• Period of Performance: March 15, 2026 – September 15, 2027  

Award: 

• $7,500 per site
• Each site will be awarded as an IHI Age-Friendly system status designation.
• If interested, please download and complete the application below.

Email completed application and required attachments to: [email protected]