by Stephen Evans, MD (geriatrician, New York)*
A dilemma exists in implementing the role of Care Navigator, when that care management role includes translation of medical treatment choices for patients and their families; how is the Navigator to assist patients/families to understand when an intervention is more or less likely to cause overall benefit or harm, especially in the usual situation of multiple simultaneous co-morbidities?
Physicians know (or should know) that, as people age and accumulate disabilities, more aggressive interventions may be as likely to cause harm as benefit. We call this transitional time in patients one of increasing frailty, in which frailty is defined as vulnerability to adverse clinical outcomes; I wonder if taking frailty into account might make the Care Navigator’s job clearer in the Minimally Disruptive Medicine care model.
Several studies have shown that frailty in either of two constructs (the Hopkins/Fried Phenotype or the Rockwood/FI-CGA) predicts quite powerfully patients’ likely benefit or harm from interventions. It’s easiest to think of “vitality” or normal adult functioning as one end of a spectrum, with “frailty”, with decreasing functioning at the other end, and the challenge is to assist a patient/family to understand where the individual patient sits on that continuum of vitality-frailty; placing a patient on that spectrum makes it easier to consider the likely benefits/risks of treatment.
Our group uses the FI-CGA, which has a wider mathematical “spread”, allowing more nuanced measurement of a patient’s frailty in this way. We use the patient’s score to contextualize shared decision-making among patients/families and caregivers.
So, a patient who is “vital” (not frail, such as, for example, the 95-year-old still playing tennis regularly) has a much better chance of a successful outcome with a hip fracture repair than a frail 75-year-old with a history of stroke with dementia, depression, and physical disability. At the same time, no tool, including the FI-CGA, predicts which patients will do well or poorly at different levels of frailty or vitality, so we try never to say “you should” do one thing or the other. Rather, we outline the choices, the patient’s frailty, a ballpark sense of what the patient’s status could be with or without the intervention, and then try to help the patient/family determine which treatment choices they prefer given the attendant risks and benefits of treatment or non-treatment of acute or chronic illness.
Studies published recently suggest that frailty measurement may be the best way to assist geriatric patients/families and caregivers to understand their risks and benefits before embarking on treatment; frailty may assist Care Navigators in their management/translational roles as they apply the Minimally Disruptive Medicine care model to these patients in the future.
*Disclosure: Dr. Evans is founder of Videx-US, a company that offers clinical decision support software for elderly patients based on the Rockwood/FI-CGA to place patients in the vitality-frailty continuum.
