Leveraging the Learning Health System to Enhance Age-Friendly Surgical Care: A Hybrid Type III Randomized Trial to Optimize Preoperative Readiness

Preoperative comprehensive geriatric assessment (pCGA) is an existing clinical intervention (herein referred to by the clinic that delivers the intervention, as Perioperative Optimization for Senior Health, POSH) to address frailty among older adults before elective surgery; however, this highly effective intervention is resource-intensive and variably delivered to a limited number of eligible patients. The researchers propose a 12-month trial embedded in the electronic health record that will test the effect of automated referrals to the POSH clinic on implementation outcomes (reach and adoption) of POSH and secondarily on the delivery of age-friendly process measures for surgical care (effectiveness). We hypothesize that randomizing frail older adults (age 80 years and older) who are planning major surgery to an automated referral will increase the reach of POSH, and the adoption among surgeons while simultaneously improving processes associated with age-friendly care (decreasing potentially inappropriate medication use as measured by anticholinergic burden (ACB) score, increasing documentation of baseline cognitive status, increasing use of physical therapy (PT) referrals, and improving the percentage of patients with advanced care planning paperwork on file before surgery).