Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Alan R. Morse, PhD, President and CEO, The Jewish Guild for the Blind, 15 W. 65 Street, New York, NY 10023, 212-769-6215, armorse@jgb.org and Barbara Litke, MA, Vice President Rehabilitation and Education, The Jewish Guild for the Blind, 15 W. 65 Street, New York, NY 10023.

The rehabilitation system for individuals who are blind or visually impaired has evolved from a system designed to address the needs of military personnel injured in combat and who required compensatory and adaptive skills to permit them to lead useful and functional lives. These individuals were young and otherwise healthy, in terms of disease status, although they often had other physical impairments. Under this service model, the consumer is viewed as having a specific set of discrete needs that can be addressed with a specific and well-defined set of services. After service delivery is completed, the consumer's needs are considered met and the involvement of the service provider is generally minimal. Such episodic intervention addresses needs as discrete, limited in their duration, and remediable by one-time or short-term intervention. In the case of older individuals, however, needs rarely end -- they evolve into other needs, often with greater complexity, criticality, and inevitably, at greater expense. The challenge is to create a coordinated system that enhances well-being, while providing mechanisms for controlling cost, i.e., sustainable ways to provide for aged individuals who are blind and visually impaired. We developed a four-year demonstration project to provide an alternative model for providing for services to older New Yorkers with visual impairment that seamlessly integrates vision care and rehabilitation into a delivery system flexible enough to address a full range of needs and to control costs by using capitation payments. This presentation will discuss the experience of the first year of program operation.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe different models of care. 2.Articulate the difference in conventional and capitated models.3.Identify strengths of capitation for coordinated care. 4.Articulate the impact of demographic changes on care model requirements

Keywords: Aging, Vision Care

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation