Pepper Scholar James Deardorff, MD and Adrian Haimovich, MD, PhD published an editorial entitled "From bedside-to-model: Designing clinical prediction rules for implementation" in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
In this study, Drs. Deardorff and Haimovich evaluated a tool called the Elders Risk Assessment (ERA) that helps identify older adults at high risk of serious illness within one year of a primary care visit. The ERA was originally developed using data from older adults in primary care clinics and includes factors like age, marital status, hospitalization history, and certain health conditions. The advantage of ERA is that it can be easily used in electronic health records due to its simplicity. The researchers found that the ERA tool had good accuracy in predicting critical illness, with a cutoff score of 9 being recommended for primary care use. Overall, the ERA score can be a helpful tool for predicting serious illness in older adults within one year of a primary care visit.