RESEARCH
eFI QH Project
A Digital Frailty Index for Acute Care Settings
Health care systems are currently designed to meet the needs of patients with acute, single-system problems, and many frail patients of all ages receive invasive treatments from which they cannot recover.
Specialists are basing their decision-making on their technical expertise, rather than on an understanding of the frailty status of patients and how that impacts the risks and benefits of interventions.
Frailty identifies patients at greatest risk of multiple adverse outcomes, including longer inpatient stay, hospital-acquired complications, and death.
We aim to develop and integrate a digital frailty index into hospital systems to enable frailty-informed decision-making about treatments and care options.
About the project
We will use existing patient data that is collected into Queensland Health integrated medical record – the ieMR – to develop an electronic Frailty Index for Queensland Hospitals (eFI QH).
Once developed we will undertake a shadow implementation to establish the validity of the eFI and to quantify the prevalence and impact of frailty in acute care settings in Queensland.
We will also test and optimise the eFI in clinical practice through a pilot implementation study within an inpatient oncology setting.
Project team and funding
This project is funded through a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) 2023 Partnership Project Grant, with a grant duration of five years.
Professor Ruth Hubbard, Masonic Chair of Geriatric Medicine at the Centre for Health Services Research at the University of Queensland, is the Principal Investigator for this project.
The research team includes academic geriatricians, biostatisticians, digital health experts, allied health professionals, and consumer representatives.
Project plan
We will use data that hospitals already collect to create a digital tool that measures how frail patients are.
Establish the validity means to make sure that the eFI works correctly and gives trustworthy results.
To find out how common frailty is, how it affects patients, and how much it costs in hospitals in Queensland.
To try out and improve the digital tool for measuring frailty in real hospital settings
To help introduce the digital tool for measuring frailty in hospitals across Queensland.
When this step is finished, we want a digital tool for measuring frailty to be used in all hospital settings, and we want to have found and fixed the reasons for any missing data needed for the digital tool.
When this step is finished, we want to confirm that the digital tool is accurate, especially in predicting important negative outcomes.
When this step is finished, we want to have a tested and improved dashboard for the digital tool, and we want to fully understand what helps or hinders the acceptance and use of the digital tool.
At the end of this project, we want to have a plan for using the digital tool in all hospitals, and we want to create important recommendations for using it across the whole country.
List of investigators
Investigator
Institution
Prof Ruth Hubbard
The University of Queensland
Prof Sarah Hilmer
The University of Sydney
Dr Adrienne Young
The University of Queensland
Prof Ken Rockwood
Dalhousie Univeristy
Prof Clair Sullivan
The University of Queensland
Prof Andrew Clegg
University of Leeds
Ms Anja Cristoffersen
Consumer Investigator
Dr David Ward
The University of Queensland
Prof Tracy Comans
National Ageing Research Institute
Dr Leila Shafiee Hanjani
The University of Queensland
Prof Elizabeth Whiting
Queensland Health
Prof Jason Pole
The University of Queensland
Ms Marianne Fenton
Queensland Health
Dr Ahmad Abdel-Hafez
eHealth Queensland
A/Prof Paul Yates
University of Melbourne
Ms Leonie Young
Consumer representative
Prof Euan Walpole
Princess Alexandra Hospital
Prof Christopher Etherton-Beer
University of Western Australia
Ms Lynne Wall
Queensland Health
Dr Kenji Fujita
The University of Sydney
Please direct any queries to Ida Tornvall, Research Manager, at [email protected]
