GEAR Consensus Conference

Executive Summary

The Geriatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (GEAR) aims to establish infrastructure to support collaborative, interdisciplinary research to improve care for older adults. Toward that end, the GEAR Task Force is developing consensus papers and an overall research map for GEAR and for geriatric emergency medicine in general. On October 25–26, 2019, the Task Force convened a conference in Denver, Colorado, to explore priority questions generated by Task Force subcommittees and to develop consensus on key research priorities and how to study them. The consensus conference, which comprised five mini-conferences focused on the domains of cognitive impairment, medication safety, elder abuse, falls, and care transitions, brought together a diverse group of stakeholders.

On October 25, GEAR Task Force subcommittees presented overviews of work leading up to the conference and the priority questions they had developed. On Saturday, October 26, conference participants broke into small groups and discussed which questions to study in each of the five areas, how best to study those questions, and which data should be collected. Conference participants then reconvened, reported on their small-group discussions, and engaged in further discussion. On the basis of these reports and discussions, subcommittee co-chairs refined their priority questions. Although all priority questions were considered important, conference participants voted to rank-order the refined questions. The subcommittees will use these questions to develop study designs, which will be pulled together in an initial observational pilot research project to begin in Summer 2020.