Olga Jarrín Montaner
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Public Health & Epidemiology
Older adults move between home, hospital, nursing facility and hospice. Along the way their physical function and cognition can decline, and sometimes recover.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
- Topics
aging
gerontology
Alzheimer's disease and related dementias
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Harmonize and merge multiple datasets into a repository of aging trajectories linking care settings, geriatric syndromes and physical function to patient, community, health-system and environmental risk factors such as air pollution.
- Identify patterns of aging trajectories in the final years of life for older adults with chronic conditions such as dementia, diabetes or heart failure, using propensity score-matched comparison groups.
- Use model-based approaches and machine learning to discover interacting predictors of trajectories and outcomes, such as rapid functional decline or ventilator use among Medicare beneficiaries with COVID-19.
- Test whether skilled home health care before and during the last year of life reduces hospital admissions among people with dementia, compared with people without dementia, using linked Medicare data.
- Examine how skilled home health care affects hospice use and place of death, and whether it narrows racial and ethnic disparities in these end-of-life outcomes for people with dementia.
More about the research
Understanding these paths, called aging trajectories, and what drives them is key to keeping people independent and giving better care near the end of life. The two projects pursue this goal with large health datasets. One builds shared data infrastructure for studying aging trajectories. The other uses Medicare data to ask whether home health care reduces racial and ethnic disparities in end-of-life care for people with dementia.
Why it matters
This work could give health systems and policymakers actionable evidence to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in end-of-life care for older adults with dementia, for example by expanding skilled home health care. Its shared data infrastructure could help researchers evaluate interventions that reduce burdensome care transitions and help older adults maintain functional independence.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Monica O'Reilly-Jacob
Columbia University, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify people living with dementia who receive care from nurse practitioners serving as main or ancillary primary care providers, by correcting Medicare claims for incident-to billing and applying the Primary Care Provider Identification Algorithm (PCP-IA).
Krista Harrison
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Identify how Black, Latinx and Asian American care partners define high-quality end-of-life dementia care, through interviews with 90 people about hospice and other home-based supportive care.
Rebecca Rodin
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Compare changes in opioid use after the 2016 CDC guidelines between older adults with and without Alzheimer's disease and related dementias who have cancer or hip or pelvic fracture, using Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey data and a difference-in-differences design.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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