Frailty in Switzerland – Towards personalized health for older adults

11 May 2023, University Hospital Zurich

More information about the symposium and link to registration can be found here: https://www.usz.ch/veranstaltung/frailty-in-switzerland-towards-personalized-health-for-older-adults/

Frailty is an age-associated syndrome which has been suggested to be a better predictor of complications among the growing number of older patients in acute care than age alone. Despite increasing research in recent years, frailty is still under-recognized in the acute care setting and no clear consensus for an operational definition has been established.

The Swiss Frailty Network and Repository (SFNR) is the first national research project on frailty in Switzerland including all five University Hospitals and two of their affiliated hospitals. The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) funded SFNR as a driver project to investigate the feasibility and validity of an automated electronic frailty screening index (efrailtyIndex) derived from 55 routinely collected patient data as part of the electronic health records. In addition, to validate this index against the gold standard frailty assessment performed by the Geriatric expert team, the program first agreed on a clinical operational definition of the Fried frailty phenotype in the 5 Geriatric University Teams in Switzerland, and then assessed this clinical gold standard in a subsample of 1’457 geriatric inpatients who were also assessed by the novel efrailtyIndex.

The project builds on a strong collaboration between the University Geriatric Teams of the 5 University Hospitals and their IT teams, as well as IT experts from the SPHN network.  The program will allow the collection of harmonized data on frailty for the acute care setting in Switzerland and will lay important groundwork for a comprehensive database to advance the topic for medicine of tomorrow for the growing amount of complex older patients in acute care.

You are cordially invited to join us for this half-day symposium at the USZ were we will present and discuss the results and the lessons learned from our project with the scientific community for the first time.