Effectiveness of in-hospital geriatric co-management: a systematic review and meta-analysis

geriatric consultation teams have failed to impact clinical outcomes prompting geriatric co-management programmes to emerge as a promising strategy to manage frail patients on non-geriatric wards.

to conduct a systematic review of the effectiveness of in-hospital geriatric co-management.

MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL and CENTRAL were searched from inception to 6 May 2016. Reference lists, trial registers and PubMed Central Citations were additionally searched.

randomised controlled trials and quasi-experimental studies of in-hospital patients included in a geriatric co-management study. Two investigators performed the selection process independently.

standardised data extraction and assessment of risk of bias were performed independently by two investigators.

twelve studies and 3,590 patients were included from six randomised and six quasi-experimental studies. Geriatric co-management improved functional status and reduced the number of patients with complications in three of the four studies, but studies had a high risk of bias and outcomes were measured heterogeneously and could not be pooled. Co-management reduced the length of stay (pooled mean difference, -1.88 days [95% CI, -2.44 to -1.33]; 11 studies) and may reduce in-hospital mortality (pooled odds ratio, 0.72 [95% CI, 0.50-1.03]; 7 studies). Meta-analysis identified no effect on the number of patients discharged home (5 studies), post-discharge mortality (3 studies) and readmission rate (4 studies).

there was low-quality evidence of a reduced length of stay and a reduced number of patients with complications, and very low-quality evidence of better functional status as a result of geriatric co-management.