Frailty index predicts geriatric psychiatry inpatient mortality: a case-control study

Many geriatric psychiatry patients suffer from complex psychiatric and medical problems and a minority of patients dies in-hospital. We assess whether a frailty index (FI) predicts inpatient mortality.

Electronic health records from 276 patients of a geriatric psychiatry department over 3 years (2015-2017) in Austria were analysed using logistic regression analysis.

Mortality rate was 4.2%. The adjusted effect of frailty (per 0.1 FI) on mortality was odds ratio = 3.25 (95% CI = 2.29-4.79). The area under the curve of 0.81 (95% CI = 0.76-0.86) suggested acceptable predictive accuracy.

We found that a non-negligible minority of geronto-psychiatric patients died in-hospital, which can be usefully predicted by the FI derived from routine electronic patient records.