The Management and Administrative Core of this proposed Roybal Center will be led by Overall Principal Investigator Scott Halpern, MD, PhD, with assistance from the other members of the Center's Steering Committee. The central goal of this Core is to provide the infrastructure and expertise necessary to support the design, testing, and dissemination of behavioral interventions that improve palliative care for persons with dementia (PWD) and their caregivers in long-term services and support (LTSS) facilities across the U.S. Several characteristics of the Center and its investigators position us uniquely well to achieve this goal. First, we have partnered with dozens of external, non-academic healthcare organizations during the past decade, and have thus learned how to align our work with institutional priorities, problem-solve in unfamiliar environments, and assist organizations that are not accustomed to conducting research in ensuring appropriate safeguards and human subjects research protections. This experience will enable us to capitalize on our tremendous opportunity to produce generalizable evidence of the effectiveness of scalable interventions by conducting our pilot projects within LTSS facilities owned by Genesis HealthCare, the nation's largest LTSS company. Second, we have considerable experience developing and testing behavioral interventions to improve advance care planning, symptom management, and other palliative care services for PWD in LTSS facilities including nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. Third, several Center investigators are among the world leaders in the design, conduct, and ethics of large, pragmatic trials, particularly trials testing behavioral interventions. Fourth, our investigators include leaders of several other NIA-supported Centers, facilitating collaborations, shared resources, and other efficiencies in conducting impactful research. Finally, this new Roybal Center will directly leverage the existing resources of two robust, multidisciplinary research centers at Penn: the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Center, and the Penn Memory Center. We will also benefit from formal linkages with Penn's hubs for behavioral economics (the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics) and biomedical informatics (the Institute for Biomedical Informatics). To achieve its overall goal, this Core has seven specific aims, including to: plan, implement, and coordinate all Center activities such as the annual Symposium; engage and manage the Center's Advisory Committee; develop new strategic collaborations with other LTSS companies; grow our national network of Affiliated Investigators working to improve residential palliative care for PWD; foster collaborations with other NIA-supported Centers; oversee data linkages that will enhance the efficient measurement of the effects of our interventions; and disseminate the Center's findings through a coordinated communications strategy.
