Project Description:

Over half of older adults admitted to the intensive care unit each year meet criteria for frailty, which is an age-associated state of vulnerable health associated with worse outcomes in the ICU. ICU clinicians urgently need an effective tool to identify frail older patients to personalize their care. Our team is adapting an existing frailty tool so that it may be used in the ICU setting.

The importance of cross-disciplinary research in the context of this project:

Dr. Ferrante is a critical care physician-scientist who has led NIA-funded research to establish the importance of frailty in the context of ICU survival and recovery. Dr. Callahan is a geriatrician physician-scientist who has led NIA-funded research to adapt and implement an electronic health record-based frailty index leveraging routine clinical care data that currently reaches 500,000+ older adults in the WFUSM-affiliated Atrium Health system. Drs. Callahan and Ferrante bring complementary expertise in aging and critical care, along with shared expertise in the clinical impact of frailty on function and cognition.

Next Steps:

We anticipate externally validating the new eFI-ICU with partners such as the Advocate Health and Yale-New Haven healthcare systems, assessing its association with long-term functional and cognitive outcomes, and developing multi-site trials on post-ICU recovery targeting, and stratifying, on frailty.

The importance/value of RCCN funding for this collaborative research:

This support allows our team the protected time and resources to adapt the eFI for use in the ICU, demonstrate the association between the eFI-ICU and critical care outcomes, and build the foundation for future collaborations.