Background: Older adults face high mortality following resuscitation efforts for in-hospital cardiac arrest.Less is known about the role of frailty in survival to discharge after in-hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation.Objective: To investigate whether frailty, measured by the Clinical Frailty Scale, is associated with mortality after cardiopulmonary resuscitation following in-hospital cardiac arrest in older adults in the USA.Design: Retrospective cohort study.Participants: Patients ≥ 65 years who had undergone cardiopulmonary resuscitation during an inpatient admission at two urban academic hospitals and three suburban community hospitals within a Boston area healthcare system from January 2018-January 2020. Patients with Clinical Frailty Scale scores 1-3 were considered not frail, 4-6 were considered very mildly, mildly, and moderately frail, respectively, and 7-9 were considered severely frail.
Limited health literacy is associated with worse health outcomes. It is standard practice in many primary care clinics to provide patients with written patient education materials (PEM), which often come directly from an electronic health record (EHR). We compared the health literacy of patients in a primary care residency clinic with EHR PEM readability by grade level. We assessed health literacy using the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine-Short Form (REALM-SF), and determined grade level readability for the PEM distributed for the five most common clinical diagnoses using the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) and Flesch-Kincaid metrics. Among 175 participants, health literacy was ≥9th grade for 76 patients (43.4%), 7th to 8th grade for 66 patients (37.7%), and ≤6th grade for 30 patients (17.1%). Average standard PEM readability by SMOG was grade 9.2 and easy-to-read PEM readability was grade 6.8. These findings suggest a discrepancy between the health literacy of most patients who were surveyed and standard PEM readability. Despite national guidelines encouraging clinicians to provide PEM at an appropriate reading level, our results indicate that PEM from EHR may not be readable for many patients.
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Health Literacy Research and Practice
. 2017;1(4):e203–e207.]
The comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) is the core tool used by geriatricians across diverse clinical settings to identify vulnerabilities and estimate physiologic reserve in older adults. In this paper, we demonstrate the iterative process at our institution to identify and develop a feasible, acceptable, and sustainable bedside CGA-based frailty index tool (FI-CGA) that not only quantifies and grades frailty but also provides a uniform way to efficiently communicate complex geriatric concepts such as reserve and vulnerability with other teams. We describe our incorporation of the FI-CGA into the electronic health record (EHR) and dissemination among clinical services. We demonstrate that an increasing number of patients have documented FI-CGA in their initial assessment from 2018 to 2020, while additional comanagement services were established (Figure 2). The acceptability and sustainability of the FI-CGA, and
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