CMSS Awards ACS Grant to Expand Age-Friendly Approaches to Specialty Ambulatory Care

The ACS is one of six specialty societies that has been awarded a grant from the Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS), in a partnership with the John A. Hartford Foundation, to advance age-friendly care in outpatient specialty and subspecialty medicine.

This funding supports efforts to develop targeted resources and promote adoption of the Age-Friendly Health Systems 4Ms Framework—What Matters, Medication, Mentation, and Mobility—into practice.

The ACS grant is for “Integrating the Age-Friendly 4Ms into Ambulatory Surgery.”

Per CMSS, “Building on their inpatient surgery experience, the ACS will implement Age-Friendly 4Ms processes in ambulatory surgery through the development of foundational tools and an implementation guide that ambulatory surgical teams can use to deliver better age-friendly care for older adults undergoing ambulatory surgery.”

The award is approximately $200,000 and was the result of a competitive process.

The ACS has previously been recognized for its efforts to promote age-friendly care. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services implemented the Age Friendly Hospital Measure in its Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program in 2025, which is based on the work from the ACS in improving care and outcomes of older adult patients through the Geriatric Surgery Verification Program.

CMSS is a coalition of more than 50 organizations that represent more than 800,000 physicians, with the goal of elevating the role of medical specialty societies in healthcare by providing opportunities for collaboration, offering education and training for health professionals, advocating for shared priorities, and more. 

The John A. Hartford Foundation, based in New York City, is a private, nonpartisan, national philanthropy dedicated to improving the care of older adults.