Using share medical decision-making model to eliminate aging disparities in health care

Among various predicaments in the healthcare environment, healthcare disparities have become one of the most critical concerns that researchers, practitioners, and policy makers have studied and searched for a remedy. While racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic disparities in health care have been extensively documented, some evidence demonstrates that aging or age-related disparities in health care are a significant emerging trend that merits increased attention (Majeed and Cook, 1996; Bowling et al, 2000; Gurwitz et al, 2001; Madan et al, 2001; Hajjar et al, 2002; Jazieh and Buncher, 2002; Jerant et al, 2004). Researchers have focused their studies on various aspects of aging disparities, such as healthcare access, the relationship and communication between the health care provider and patient, and the delivery of certain diagnostic procedures and treatment interventions (Jerant et al, 2004). However, there is a paucity of applications of theoretical models to explain and predict disparities. This paper proposes a theoretical model that could be utilized to explicate the concepts and elucidate the logic of the aging disparities in health care. The authors specifically employ the shared medical decision-making model as a basic framework on which the model is built. The concepts and law-like generalizations are defined and discussed. Two sets of reconstruction of explanations will be provided to summarize the underlying logic and illustrate the flow of components of the proposed model. A set of propositions is identified for the purpose of testing the model.