Clinical Academic Group Collaboration Leads to $3 million Grant
Members of Sydney Health Partners’ Geriatric Medicine CAG have been awarded $3 million in funding for a new clinical implementation study, which will use routinely collected data in the hospital electronic medical records of older patients to automatically and efficiently screen them for frailty.
By automating screening for frailty, the research team hopes that clinicians will be able to spend more time on providing optimal care tailored to the needs of frail older people, rather than on manual screening.
Study Chief Investigator and Chair of the Geriatric Medicine CAG, Professor Sarah Hilmer, says the grant from the Medical Research Future Fund will help to bring Australian models of care in line with international guidelines.
“The guidelines strongly recommend that all older people are screened for frailty as an essential first step to providing frailty-informed health care,” she said. “Our research will inform health services about the facilities, resources and staff required to meet the needs of people with frailty.
“On an individual basis, it means patients will receive specialised, multidisciplinary care, including the Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment model of care, which increases the likelihood that patients continue living at home and reduces their likelihood of moving into a nursing home.”
The idea and the pilot data for the successful grant application were developed by the Geriatric Medicine CAG, which is funded by Sydney Health Partners.
Almost all the members of the CAG’s Leadership Group are either Chief Investigators or Associate Investigators on the grant. In addition, Associate Investigator Professor Cathie Sherrington is Co-Chair of the Musculoskeletal CAG, and Associate Investigator Dr Mitchell Sarkies is Co-Lead of SHP’s Implementation Science Academy.
“I am delighted to lead a strong, multidisciplinary, national and international team to develop the crucial technology we need for efficient frailty screening of older people in hospital,” said Professor Hilmer.
The planned development and implementation of automatic hospital screening will mark the first time that the Frailty Index - which was first developed in Canada and has since been widely validated internationally - has been implemented on such a large scale in acute hospital care.
“While the Frailty Index has been used extensively in research in hospital care, to our knowledge it has never been used at scale during the person’s hospital admission,” said Professor Hilmer.
“Our aim is to develop and strategically implement technology which can calculate the Frailty Index for all older inpatients in real time.
“By doing so, we can use the information to improve the care of individual patients and also optimise our health services.”