Frailty Score Based Entirely on ICD-10 Codes for Hospitalized Elders

Frailty can be defined as age-related multisystem decline with vulnerability to apparently innocuous stressors. Hospitalized frail elders can have complex clinical and social needs, beyond their acute diagnoses. Although numerous tools are available to identify frail elders, they yield varying results and can be excessively complex or require subjective manual input.

Researchers in the U.K. used a retrospective cluster analysis to identify hospitalized elders (age, ≥75) with high resource use and diagnoses associated with frailty; they then developed a hospital frailty risk score (HFRS) based solely on International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-10 codes that were overrepresented in this group. This HFRS was applied prospectively to two v…