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NASEM — Strategies and Interventions to Strengthen Support for Family Caregiving (2025)

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Board on Health Care Services. "Strategies and Interventions to Strengthen Support for Family Caregiving: A Workshop." Draft agenda for a two-day workshop held June 5–6, 2025, at the Keck Center, Washington, DC. Planning Committee Chair: Peggy Maguire, Cambia Health Foundation.

Key findings used in wiki

What the workshop was for

The workshop was convened to surface evidence-based interventions and strategies that effectively address the physical, mental, and financial burdens of caregiving for cancer and other serious illnesses, including the role of palliative care. Purpose statements from the draft agenda:

  • Examine interventions addressing the psychological, emotional, physical, and financial/economic burdens of caregiving, including the increased risk of suicide among caregivers.
  • Explore the role of palliative care in interventions to ease caregiver burden.
  • Examine the special needs of different caregiver populations (children, older adults, individuals with disabilities).
  • Consider how successful programs can be scaled and spread throughout the United States.
  • Explore policy opportunities to support family caregivers, including employer and workplace-based programs.

Session structure and who convened

The workshop agenda was organized around six sessions across two days:

  1. Family caregiving and the U.S. health care system — value, unmet needs, and psychosocial / financial / cultural considerations across caregiver populations.
  2. New challenges and opportunities at state and federal levels — RAISE Family Caregivers Act, health-system / state / employer connections.
  3. Deep dive on caregiving policies, programs, and financing — employer programs, Medicare payment for caregiver education, Medicare value-based payments, state-based Medicaid payments.
  4. Additional sessions on scaling, palliative care, and population-specific caregiver realities.

Moderators and planning committee members included Jason Resendez (National Alliance for Caregiving), Rita Choula (AARP), Alison Barkoff (George Washington University), and Wendy Fox-Grage (National Academy for State Health Policy) — the same network that anchors the NFCSP, HHS National Caregiver Strategy, and NAC Transplant Caregiving Collaborative work.

What the agenda signals

  • Medicare payment for caregiver education is an explicit policy lever being examined at the national level in 2025 — consistent with the rollout of Medicare Caregiver Training Services (CTS) billing codes.
  • Employer-based programs are treated as a first-class policy surface, not a soft extra — consistent with the FamTech sector finding that employers are a primary partnership channel.
  • Scaling and spreading successful interventions is framed as the remaining challenge — the 2019 Research Priorities document asked for translation, scalability, and sustainability work, and the 2025 NASEM agenda is now funding that conversation.
  • The workshop includes deliberate space for trauma-informed debrief, which is itself a signal that the field treats caregiver support as an area where care-quality design matters, not just service access.

Why it matters for the wiki

  • Provides a 2025-current, NASEM-level policy signal for the evidence/federal-caregiver-policy.md synthesis — the federal caregiver-policy conversation is active, national, and explicitly focused on payment mechanisms and scaling.
  • Supports the partnership-first positioning claim: employers, payers (Medicare value-based), and state Medicaid are all inside the 2025 policy scope for caregiver support.