Using electronic consultation (eConsult) to identify frailty in provider-to-provider communication: a feasibility and validation study

Table 2 Characteristics of Long-term care and Community eConsult cases included for analysis

a. Total sample
Setting	LTC (mean ± SD)	Community (mean ± SD)
N	113	112
Patient age	80.6 ± 11.6	79.8 ± 11.2
Patient gender (% female)	62.8%	62.5%
Overall word count per case	586.22 ± 393.54	458.62 ± 362.74
Frequency of frailty-related terms per case	4.55 ± 3.95^c	1.96 ± 2.68^c
Cases with ≥ 1 frailty-related term(s) (n, %)	105, 92.9%^c	68, 60.7%^c
Cases with highest rating for Frailty rating 1^a (n, %)	107, 96.7%	55, 55.6%
Cases with highest rating for Frailty rating 2^a (n, %)	106, 95.5%	52, 57.8%
b. Subset of cases deemed to have insufficient information to make a frailty rating^b
N	2	22
Overall word count per case	363.00 ± 56.57	322.86 ± 146.83
Frequency of frailty-related terms per case	1.00 ± 0.00	0.32 ± 0.78

Abbreviations: LTC long-term care, SD standard deviation
^aFrailty ratings were assigned for each case by clinicians. Frailty rating 1 represents clinicians’ assessment after reading the initial PCP communication only, and frailty rating 2 represents their assessment after reading the full PCP-specialist eConsult communication
^beConsult cases were deemed to have insufficient information by clinicians when attempting to assign a frailty rating
^cThe difference between LTC cases and community cases was statistically different (p < .001)

ISSN: 1471-2318