The high level of unmet mental health needs of older adults in the United States, coupled with theanticipated huge growth in the number of older adults over the next decades, underscore theimportance of developing and using effective approaches to improve access to care, quality ofcare, and patient outcomes. Evidence-based practices in mental health are an integral part of theplan to achieve this goal. This SBIR contract will work with experts to improve the quality ofevidence-based mental health practices through the development of extensive curriculum,educational materials, and methodologies to educate young investigators and clinicians, graduatefellows, and undergraduate students with the hope of bringing them into the pipeline, creating aresearcher base for future research, and training the end users to integrate it into their practice.Besides reviewing the existing strong evidence base, this program will also look into the evidencegap, identifying areas where more research is needed. The end product will be a Web basedplatform hosting expert panel discussions, interactive educational modules, and a host of peer reviewedresources. This initiative will create a credible, content rich, current, and innovativelearning system that will be constantly updated and will become as the most authoritative onlineresource for promoting research and implementation of evidence based practices to improve thequality of care and patient outcomes for the elderly. The infrastructure developed for this SBIRphase II will focus on geriatrics but will be easily adaptable to any other discipline.
