Two UF College of Nursing researchers have been awarded a five-year $2.57 million grant for a project that will use registered nurses’ observation notes to prevent death and injury of hospitalized older adults who are at a higher risk for hospital-acquired falls and hospital-induced delirium.
Through the grant from the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health, associate professor Robert Lucero, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N., FAAN, and assistant professor Ragnhildur Bjarnadottir, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N., seek to develop a model that will identify and predict mortality and injury related to iatrogenic conditions, or conditions induced by medical treatment, by evaluating and processing electronic data from patient health and administrative records at UF Health in Gainesville and Jacksonville.
Dr. Lucero received support from a 2017 CTSI Translational Pilot award that helped lay the groundwork for the larger research project, as well as using the CTSI-supported UF Health Integrated Data Repository. Findings from the pilot, “Identifying Predictive Algorithms using Electronic Health Record Data to Inform the Development of a Point-of-Care Early Warning System for Hospital-acquired Falls,” included the discovery of patient and environmental risk factors in registered nurse’s progress notes (i.e., not found in structured assessment data) that are significantly different between hospitalized patients who fell and those who were at-risk but did not fall. These new findings supported by the CTSI Translational Pilot award were essential to the success of expanding the work of identifying text data pipelines and developing predictive algorithms for iatrogenic conditions, including hospital-acquired falls and hospital-induced delirium, for ongoing aging studies.