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.
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, Project Manager, at [email protected]
