Geriatrics society reports modest vaccination gains across seven health systems

The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) released a paper in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society on October 28, 2026, detailing findings from the AGS Older Adults Vaccine (AGS OAV) Initiative, a five-year effort to raise vaccination rates among older adults in the United States.

The initiative was launched in 2021 with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, under a financial assistance award to the Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS) known as Specialty Societies Advancing Older Adult Immunization. The award was funded 100 percent by CDC/HHS, and AGS leveraged existing resources and ongoing investments in content and technology throughout the program.

For the project, AGS partnered with seven health systems with the explicit goal of improving vaccination rates for older adults within those systems. The newly published report describes how the participating systems implemented multiple strategies to increase vaccination rates, tailored those strategies to the specific needs of their own institutions, and layered overlapping interventions on top of one another rather than relying on any single approach.

The headline result reported by the society is deliberately modest in scope. Together, the seven health systems demonstrated modest improvements in influenza and COVID-19 vaccination rates, and the society notes that these gains occurred within the context of an overall decrease in national vaccination rates. That framing matters: the improvements are relative to a declining national backdrop, and the release does not report effect sizes, absolute percentage-point changes, or statistical comparisons.

The published paper, titled “The AGS Older Adults Vaccine Initiative: Findings From Seven Participating Health Systems,” is classified by the society as a content analysis, with people as the subject of research. The authors of the paper declare no conflicts of interest. The release describes the work as a peer-reviewed publication, and the article carries the DOI 10.1111/jgs.70770.

Beyond the published findings, AGS is maintaining a dedicated initiative microsite, vaccines.agscocare.org, which will remain available and be updated regularly. The site provides free access to the collection of resources developed through the effort, including an online educational curriculum on vaccines in older adults, podcasts, webinars, teaching slides, clinical assessment tools, and a portfolio of public education materials intended to help older adults and their caregivers make informed decisions about recommended vaccines.

The society frames the initiative as part of a broader commitment to ensuring access to recommended vaccines and education about their role in health and well-being as people age. AGS describes itself as a not-for-profit organization devoted to improving the health, independence, and quality of life of older adults, with a membership of more than 6,000 geriatricians, geriatrics nurse practitioners, social workers, family practitioners, physician associates, pharmacists, and internists.

Because the release summarizes a multi-site quality improvement initiative rather than a controlled trial, the reported improvements should be read as program-level observations from seven health systems, not as evidence of efficacy for any specific intervention. The report’s value lies in documenting which combinations of tailored, overlapping strategies the systems deployed, and in making the resulting educational and clinical resources freely available to clinicians and the public.

Subject of Research: A multi-site initiative to improve influenza and COVID-19 vaccination rates among older adults in seven U.S. health systems

Article Title: AGS releases findings from the AGS older adults vaccine initiative

Article References: AGS releases findings from the AGS older adults vaccine initiative. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

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Keywords: vaccination, older adults, influenza, COVID-19, geriatrics, health systems, American Geriatrics Society, CDC, immunization, quality improvement, public health, releases