We performed a focused literature search and consulted with a working group of experienced clinicians, researchers, and patient partners to collate a list of frailty-related terms. This approach was adapted from Urquhart et al.’s development of a rule to identify frailty in administrative health databases [25 (link)]. The aim was to construct a list of terms or phrases that would commonly be used by providers to describe patients living with frailty.
The focused literature review involved an initial scan of PubMed using combinations of the following terms: “frail elderly”, “frailty”, “identification”, “definition”, “database”, and “health data”. We were particularly interested in studies that have used key-term searching to identify frailty in the free text of other healthcare datasets. We considered a variety of study types, including systematic reviews and other evidence syntheses, clinical guidelines, retrospective studies of healthcare or administrative databases, and studies that have developed or validated frailty assessment tools. Search results were supplemented by articles recommended by the research team and a hand search of reference lists of selected articles.
Relevant findings from the literature search were summarized. From each included study, we extracted terms related to the identification or assessment of frailty, including but not limited to signs and symptoms, comorbidities, disabilities, and related clinical syndromes.
To ensure the content validity of our selection, the preliminary list of frailty-related terms was then shared for feedback with a working group of clinicians (n = 4), researchers (n = 4) and a patient partner (n = 1) who are knowledgeable about LTC, primary care and frailty, each bringing diverse perspectives on these topics (see corresponding section inSupplemental Methods ). Through iterative discussions and revisions, a version of the list of frailty terms was finalized for a key-term search of the eConsult text. The list was organized by grouping terms into overarching topic categories.
The focused literature review involved an initial scan of PubMed using combinations of the following terms: “frail elderly”, “frailty”, “identification”, “definition”, “database”, and “health data”. We were particularly interested in studies that have used key-term searching to identify frailty in the free text of other healthcare datasets. We considered a variety of study types, including systematic reviews and other evidence syntheses, clinical guidelines, retrospective studies of healthcare or administrative databases, and studies that have developed or validated frailty assessment tools. Search results were supplemented by articles recommended by the research team and a hand search of reference lists of selected articles.
Relevant findings from the literature search were summarized. From each included study, we extracted terms related to the identification or assessment of frailty, including but not limited to signs and symptoms, comorbidities, disabilities, and related clinical syndromes.
To ensure the content validity of our selection, the preliminary list of frailty-related terms was then shared for feedback with a working group of clinicians (n = 4), researchers (n = 4) and a patient partner (n = 1) who are knowledgeable about LTC, primary care and frailty, each bringing diverse perspectives on these topics (see corresponding section in
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