Dr. Brian Patterson
was recently awarded a K08 grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to study the prevention of future falls among older adults presenting to the emergency department (ED). Older adults frequently rely on the ED for acute, unscheduled care, and these vists offer an opportunity to identify older adults at higher risk of falls at a time when fall risk factors can be modified. However, screening interventions in the ED often fail due to time constraints. The objective of this study is to identify adults at high risk of future falls and improve their care both during their ED visit and after discharge. In the study, in-person screening of future outpatient fall risk will be compared to electronic health record-based data extraction, EHR data will be used to develop a predictive algorithm to stratify patients by fall risk, and a clinical decision support intervention will be developed and piloted.
