Sharmistha Dev, M.D., MPH, discusses ways to make frailty screening more efficient for emergency physicians.
Transcript:
The emergency department, we are relatively busy, we don’t necessarily have time to do a lot of the traditional screening frailty tests where you ask a questionnaire of the patient or the caregiver. I wanted to do more, “Hey, we can look at the patient’s electronic health record and come up with administratively derived frailty scores and figure out which ones present as higher risk and which ones don’t.
Transcript:
Some of the scarce resources that we worry about from a health system perspective are those social work services, some home-based primary care, home-based physical therapy. Those services should be targeted to people that are at higher risk of frailty because those are the things that they may need to make sure that they don’t come back to the hospital or they don’t have an increased risk of mortality.
Dr. Dev on the importance of emergency department visits as a catalyst for deprescribing.
Transcript:
There are certain medications that make elderly patients more vulnerable to falls and dizziness, and that can certainly affect their quality of life later down the line. So by having a pharmacist that evaluates their medication list and makes suggestions to remove certain medications because they’re considered high risk is valuable because the emergency department physician doesn’t necessarily do that — going through the medication list — we’re dealing with the acute situation on hand.
