Sandra Shi hadn’t heard the term geriatrics before she started volunteering at a nursing home in college. She helped older adults do stretches and leg lifts while they recovered from injuries or hip replacements. Watching them progress and regain their ability to live independently ignited a passion that altered the course of Shi’s career.
Geriatrics, the specialty focused on providing high-quality care to older adults, is practiced in the way that medicine should be, Shi said. Geriatricians sometimes go into people’s homes. They meet their families, hear their stories. “At the end of the day, I like that it comes down to you and that patient and what their priorities are and what matters to them,” Shi said.
As a researcher, Shi is focused on using data to improve people’s lives. Her work was the first to use national Medicare claims to create a frailty index — a tool that uses grip strength, gait speed, and other factors to measure the health status of older adults in a given population — for older adults in the U.S. today. Now, she’s trying to take that to the next level by encouraging federal health programs and health care providers to use it to predict how people will respond to surgeries, medications, and other interventions and tailor their treatment based on the results.
Shi still spends a good chunk of her time doing rehabilitation with older adults in nursing homes, work that she finds meaningful and that helps her understand how her research will actually help people in the real world. “I really love that I have that feedback,” Shi said.
— Tara Bannow
