CMS's Age-Friendly Hospital Measure: Julia Adler-Milstein, Stephanie Rogers, and Shari Ling

In 2025, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) began requiring hospitals participating in the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) program to report on a new "Age-Friendly Hospital Measure." The hope is that, by attesting to this measure, hospitals will develop evidence-based processes to improve care for older adults in hospital settings.

On this week's podcast, we explore this new measure with Sheri Ling, CMS's Deputy Chief Medical Officer serving in the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ). We've also invited some returning guests from our past Age Friendly Health Systems podcast, Julia Adler-Milstein and Stephanie Rogers, to discuss how they are thinking about this new measure and how we should operationalize it.

We go over everything you will want to know about the new measure, including:

• How does this CMS measure differ from both Age-Friendly Health Systems and the 4Ms movement we've been hearing about for years (and that we did the podcast on in 2020 here)

• Why is CMS finally making "Age-Friendly" a formal, structural requirement for hospitals now?

• What is an attestation measure vs outcome measure, and why is this one an attestation measure?

• A deeper dive into the 5 domains to the measure (Eliciting Patient Goals, Medication Management, Frailty Screening, Social Determinants of Health, and Leadership/Governance.

Lastly, here are some great resources if you want to help get this started at your hospital:

• A report by JAHF, Julia and others on how to think about different dimensions of measure performance

• Health Affairs Scholar paper on related the 4Ms to the 5 domains

• Two CMS resources with detailed information on how to meet and report on the five domains of this measure:

• • Age-Friendly Hospital Specifications (July 2025)

  • Age-Friendly Hospital Measure Attestation Guide