Her career has focused on maintaining healthy brain aging, preventing delirium and functional decline, and optimizing healthcare for older adults.
[2] She attended Pomona College for her undergraduate degree where she majored in English literature before studying medicine at the UCSF Medical Center, matriculating there as the youngest of her class.
[3] She completed her internal medicine residency as UCSF and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Harvard).
As a senior resident in internal medicine at Moffitt Hospital in 1983, she married neurobiologist Stephen Lewis Helfand.
[8] These strategies, which included orientation, early mobilization, providing nutrition and hydration, and enhancing sleep without medication using warm milk and backrubs, were encapsulated in the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP).
[16] In October 2016, Inouye received a federal grant to help establish an interdisciplinary Network for Investigation of Delirium across the United States.