Dr. Aronow’s work advances, develops, and supports the role of nursing to maximize health outcomes and well-being for all adults. For over 40 years, Dr. Aronow’s work has been interprofessional and team-based and located in inpatient, ambulatory, home, and community settings.  

 

Early in her career, Dr. Aronow trained as a research assistant in Psychiatry at Boston University Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. There Dr. Aronow worked on grant projects that spanned from studying the adaptation of a traditional academic program in psychiatry to provide care in a poor, predominantly minority catchment area; as well as teaching psychiatric residents in an emergency walk-in psychiatric clinic to ask, “How do you hope I can help you?” and engage the patient in developing a care plan. This work shaped Dr. Aronow’s career interests in research questions that re-engineer the health care system to be more patient-focused.

 

While in graduate school, Dr. Aronow worked in the research department of a medical rehabilitation specialty hospital, where she first encountered the nursing profession. This shaped her devotion to improving the health and well-being of persons with acquired and/or life-long disability. Her research there focused on outcomes for patients in the community after discharge. Working with rehab nurses, she demonstrated the value of having nurses attend and collaborate in interprofessional team conferences and care planning. 

 

While in a post-doctoral fellowship at RAND and the University of California Los Angeles, Dr. Aronow became known as someone with field experience working with community-based organizations and health delivery systems. She was recruited to direct a large field randomized controlled trial with an interprofessional research team to study comprehensive geriatric assessment used preventively among able-bodied older adults (age 75+). The intervention, was provided by advanced practice nurses identifying risks and making tailored (and negotiated) recommendations for what the older adult could do to maintain or improve health. 

 

From then on, preventive models of nurse-led care would stick with Dr. Aronow in all her subsequent research endeavors. Moving to Cedars-Sinai, under the leadership and in partnership with Cedars-Sinai Senior Nurse Executive Dr. Linda Burnes Bolton, an American Academy of Nursing (Academy) Living Legend and former Academy President, they applied the nursing model to address the care of older adult inpatients at risk of frailty. Together, they have taken the model back into the community as transitional care and, coming full circle, as a preventive intervention. The concept of prevention also underpinned the partnership that grew into the Collaborative Alliance for Nursing Outcomes, to which Dr. Aronow brought her experience in nursing-sensitive indicator measure development and evaluation research.  

 

Dr. Aronow received her doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, which is nationally known for its program in applied social psychology and evaluation research. She was inducted as an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2021.